adolf/docs/gateway/health.md

summary, read_when, title

summary	read_when	title
Health check commands and gateway health monitoring	Diagnosing channel connectivity or gateway health Understanding health check CLI commands and options	Health checks

Short guide to verify channel connectivity without guessing.

Quick checks

• openclaw status - local summary: gateway reachability/mode, update hint, linked channel auth age, sessions + recent activity.
• openclaw status --all - full local diagnosis (read-only, color, safe to paste for debugging).
• openclaw status --deep - asks the running gateway for a live probe (health with probe:true), including per-account channel probes when supported.
• openclaw status --usage - show model provider usage/quota snapshots.
• openclaw health - asks the running gateway for its health snapshot (WS-only; no direct channel sockets from the CLI).
• openclaw health --verbose (alias --debug) - forces a live health probe and prints gateway connection details.
• openclaw health --json - machine-readable health snapshot output.
• Send /status as a standalone chat command in any channel to get a status reply without invoking the agent.
• Logs: tail /tmp/openclaw/openclaw-*.log and filter for web-heartbeat, web-reconnect, web-auto-reply, web-inbound.

For Discord and other chat providers, session rows are not socket liveness. openclaw sessions, Gateway sessions.list, and the agent sessions_list tool read stored conversation state. A provider can reconnect and show healthy channel status before any new session row is materialized. Use the channel status and health commands above for live connectivity checks.

Deep diagnostics

• Creds on disk: ls -l ~/.openclaw/credentials/whatsapp/<accountId>/creds.json (mtime should be recent).
• Session store: ls -l ~/.openclaw/agents/<agentId>/sessions/sessions.json (path can be overridden in config). Count and recent recipients are surfaced via status.
• Relink flow: openclaw channels logout && openclaw channels login --verbose when status codes 409-515 or loggedOut appear in logs. The QR login flow auto-restarts once for status 515 after pairing.
• Diagnostics are enabled by default (diagnostics.enabled: false disables them). Memory events record RSS/heap byte counts and threshold/growth pressure; critical memory pressure logs through the gateway logger and, when diagnostics.memoryPressureSnapshot: true is set, also writes a pre-OOM stability bundle (V8 heap stats, Linux cgroup counters when available, active resource counts, largest session/transcript files by redacted relative path). Liveness warnings record event-loop delay/utilization, CPU-core ratio, and active/waiting/queued session counts when the process is running but saturated. Oversized-payload events record what was rejected/truncated/chunked plus sizes and limits, never message text, attachment contents, webhook bodies, raw request/response bodies, tokens, cookies, or secret values.
• The same heartbeat drives the bounded stability recorder: openclaw gateway stability (or the diagnostics.stability Gateway RPC). Fatal Gateway exits, shutdown timeouts, restart startup failures, and (when diagnostics.memoryPressureSnapshot: true) critical memory pressure persist the latest snapshot under ~/.openclaw/logs/stability/. Inspect the newest bundle with openclaw gateway stability --bundle latest.
• For bug reports, run openclaw gateway diagnostics export and attach the generated zip: a Markdown summary, the newest stability bundle, sanitized log metadata, sanitized Gateway status/health snapshots, and config shape. Chat text, webhook bodies, tool outputs, credentials, cookies, account/message identifiers, and secret values are omitted or redacted. See Diagnostics Export.

Health monitor config

• gateway.channelHealthCheckMinutes: how often the gateway checks channel health. Default: 5. Set 0 to disable health-monitor restarts globally.
• gateway.channelStaleEventThresholdMinutes: how long a connected channel can stay idle before the health monitor treats it as stale and restarts it. Default: 30. Keep this greater than or equal to gateway.channelHealthCheckMinutes.
• gateway.channelMaxRestartsPerHour: rolling one-hour cap for health-monitor restarts per channel/account. Default: 10.
• channels.<provider>.healthMonitor.enabled: disable health-monitor restarts for a specific channel while leaving global monitoring enabled.
• channels.<provider>.accounts.<accountId>.healthMonitor.enabled: multi-account override that wins over the channel-level setting.
• These per-channel overrides apply to the built-in channels that expose them today: Discord, Google Chat, iMessage, IRC, Microsoft Teams, Signal, Slack, Telegram, and WhatsApp.

Uptime monitoring

External uptime monitoring services should use the dedicated /health endpoint, not /v1/chat/completions.

• DO use: GET /health - instant response, no session created, no LLM call, returns {"ok":true,"status":"live"}
• DON'T use: /v1/chat/completions for health checks - each request creates a full agent session with skill snapshot, context assembly, and LLM calls

When no x-openclaw-session-key header or user field is provided, /v1/chat/completions generates a new random session for each request. Monitoring services that ping every 15 minutes create ~96 sessions/day, each consuming 4-22KB. Over time this causes session store bloat and can lead to context window overflow.

Monitoring service setup examples

• BetterStack: Set health check URL to https://<your-gateway-host>:<port>/health
• UptimeRobot: Add a new HTTP monitor with URL https://<your-gateway-host>:<port>/health
• Generic: Any HTTP GET to /health returns 200 with {"ok":true} when the gateway is healthy

When something fails

• logged out or status 409-515 -> relink with openclaw channels logout then openclaw channels login.
• Gateway unreachable -> start it: openclaw gateway --port 18789 (use --force if the port is busy).
• No inbound messages -> confirm linked phone is online and the sender is allowed (channels.whatsapp.allowFrom); for group chats, ensure allowlist + mention rules match (channels.whatsapp.groups, agents.list[].groupChat.mentionPatterns).

Dedicated "health" command

openclaw health asks the running gateway for its health snapshot (no direct channel sockets from the CLI). By default it returns a fresh cached gateway snapshot and the gateway refreshes that cache in the background; --verbose forces a live probe instead. The command reports linked creds/auth age when available, per-channel probe summaries, session-store summary, and probe duration. It exits non-zero if the gateway is unreachable or the probe fails/times out.

Options:

• --json: machine-readable JSON output
• --timeout <ms>: override the default 10s probe timeout
• --verbose: force a live probe and print gateway connection details
• --debug: alias for --verbose

The health snapshot includes: ok (boolean), ts (timestamp), durationMs (probe time), per-channel status, agent availability, and session-store summary.

Related

• Gateway runbook
• Diagnostics export
• Gateway troubleshooting