Monitoring and Observability for OpenClaw: A Practical Guide

6 min read|2026-02-10|by Agent14

You cannot fix what you cannot see. Observability is not optional for production OpenClaw deployments.

The Three Pillars

Track quantitative data over time: request rates, error rates, latency percentiles, resource usage.

yaml

metrics:
  provider: prometheus
  scrape_interval: 15s
  retention: 30d
  targets:
    - app:3000/metrics
    - worker:3001/metrics

Move beyond plain text logs. Structured logging makes searching and alerting possible.

yaml

logging:
  format: json
  level: warn
  fields:
    - timestamp
    - request_id
    - user_id
    - action
    - duration_ms

Follow requests across services to identify bottlenecks.

yaml

tracing:
  provider: opentelemetry
  sample_rate: 0.1
  export:
    endpoint: https://otel-collector:4317
    protocol: grpc

Set up alerts for the metrics that matter:

Error rate: above 5% for 5 minutes

P99 latency: above 500ms for 5 minutes

Disk usage: above 85%

Memory usage: above 90%

A good Grafana dashboard should show:

Request rate and error rate (top row)

Latency percentiles: p50, p95, p99 (second row)

Resource usage: CPU, memory, disk (third row)

Business metrics: active users, transactions (bottom row)

Our Monitoring Stack and Logging & Observability bundles give you production-ready configs for the full observability stack.

Browse production-ready bundles or generate a custom config.