openclaw-openclaw/docs/gateway/diagnostics.md

summary, title, read_when

summary	title	read_when
Create shareable Gateway diagnostics bundles for bug reports	Diagnostics export	Preparing a bug report or support request Debugging Gateway crashes, restarts, memory pressure, or oversized payloads Reviewing what diagnostics data is recorded or redacted

OpenClaw can build a local diagnostics .zip for bug reports: sanitized Gateway status, health, logs, config shape, and recent payload-free stability events.

Treat diagnostics bundles like secrets until reviewed. Payloads and credentials are redacted by design, but the bundle still summarizes local Gateway logs and host-level runtime state.

Quick start

openclaw gateway diagnostics export

Prints the written zip path. Choose an output path:

openclaw gateway diagnostics export --output openclaw-diagnostics.zip

For automation:

openclaw gateway diagnostics export --json

Chat command

Owners can run /diagnostics [note] in any conversation to request a local Gateway export as one copy-pasteable support report:

1. Send /diagnostics, optionally with a short note (/diagnostics bad tool choice).
2. OpenClaw sends a preamble and asks for one explicit exec approval, which runs openclaw gateway diagnostics export --json. Do not approve diagnostics via an allow-all rule.
3. After approval, OpenClaw replies with the local bundle path, manifest summary, privacy notes, and relevant session ids.

In group chats, an owner can still run /diagnostics, but OpenClaw sends the export result, approval prompts, and Codex session/thread breakdown to the owner privately. The group only sees a short notice that diagnostics were sent privately. If no private owner route exists, the command fails closed and asks the owner to run it from a DM.

When the active session uses the native OpenAI Codex harness, the same exec approval also covers an OpenAI feedback upload for the Codex threads OpenClaw knows about. That upload is separate from the local Gateway zip and only happens for Codex harness sessions. The approval prompt states that approving also sends Codex feedback, without listing Codex session or thread ids. After approval, the reply lists channels, OpenClaw session ids, Codex thread ids, and local resume commands for the threads that were sent to OpenAI. Denying or ignoring the approval skips the export, the Codex feedback upload, and the Codex id list.

That makes the Codex debugging loop short: notice bad behavior in a channel, run /diagnostics, approve once, share the report, then run the printed codex resume <thread-id> command locally if you want to inspect the thread yourself. See Codex harness.

What the export contains

• summary.md: human-readable overview for support.
• diagnostics.json: machine-readable summary of config, logs, status, health, and stability data.
• manifest.json: export metadata and file list.
• Sanitized config shape and non-secret config details.
• Sanitized log summaries and recent redacted log lines.
• Best-effort Gateway status and health snapshots.
• stability/latest.json: newest persisted stability bundle, when available.

The export is still useful when the Gateway is unhealthy: if status/health requests fail, local logs, config shape, and the latest stability bundle are still collected when available.

Privacy model

Kept: subsystem names, plugin ids, provider ids, channel ids, configured modes, status codes, durations, byte counts, queue state, memory readings, sanitized log metadata, redacted operational messages, config shape, and non-secret feature settings.

Omitted or redacted: chat text, prompts, instructions, webhook bodies, tool outputs, credentials, API keys, tokens, cookies, secret values, raw request/response bodies, account ids, message ids, raw session ids, hostnames, and local usernames.

When a log message looks like user, chat, prompt, or tool payload text, the export keeps only that a message was omitted plus its byte count.

Stability recorder

The Gateway records a bounded, payload-free stability stream by default when diagnostics are enabled. It captures operational facts, not content.

The same heartbeat also samples liveness when the event loop or CPU looks saturated, emitting diagnostic.liveness.warning events with event-loop delay, event-loop utilization, CPU-core ratio, active/waiting/queued session counts, the current startup/runtime phase (when known), recent phase spans, and bounded work labels. These become Gateway warn-level log lines only when work is waiting or queued, or when active work overlaps sustained event-loop delay; otherwise they log at debug. Idle liveness samples are still recorded as diagnostic events but never escalate to a warning by themselves.

Startup phases emit diagnostic.phase.completed events with wall-clock and CPU timing. Stalled embedded-run diagnostics mark terminalProgressStale=true when the last bridge progress looked terminal (for example a raw response item or response-completion event) but the Gateway still considers the embedded run active.

Inspect the live recorder:

openclaw gateway stability
openclaw gateway stability --type payload.large
openclaw gateway stability --json

Inspect the newest persisted bundle after a fatal exit, shutdown timeout, or restart startup failure:

openclaw gateway stability --bundle latest

Create a diagnostics zip from the newest persisted bundle:

openclaw gateway stability --bundle latest --export

Persisted bundles live under ~/.openclaw/logs/stability/ when events exist.

Useful options

openclaw gateway diagnostics export \
  --output openclaw-diagnostics.zip \
  --log-lines 5000 \
  --log-bytes 1000000

Flag	Default	Description
--output <path>	$OPENCLAW_STATE_DIR/logs/support/openclaw-diagnostics-<timestamp>-<pid>.zip	Write to a specific zip path (or directory).
--log-lines <count>	5000	Maximum sanitized log lines to include.
--log-bytes <bytes>	1000000	Maximum log bytes to inspect.
--url <url>	-	Gateway WebSocket URL for status/health snapshots.
--token <token>	-	Gateway token for status/health snapshots.
--password <password>	-	Gateway password for status/health snapshots.
--timeout <ms>	3000	Status/health snapshot timeout.
--no-stability-bundle	off	Skip persisted stability bundle lookup.
--json	off	Print machine-readable export metadata.

Disable diagnostics

Diagnostics are enabled by default. To disable the stability recorder and diagnostic event collection:

{
  diagnostics: {
    enabled: false,
  },
}

Disabling diagnostics reduces bug-report detail; it does not affect normal Gateway logging.

Critical memory pressure snapshots are off by default. To capture the pre-OOM stability snapshot in addition to normal diagnostics events:

{
  diagnostics: {
    memoryPressureSnapshot: true,
  },
}

Use this only on hosts that can tolerate the extra file-system scan and snapshot write during critical memory pressure. Normal memory pressure events still record RSS, heap, threshold, and growth facts (rss_threshold, heap_threshold, rss_growth) when the snapshot is off.

Related

• Health checks
• Gateway CLI
• Gateway protocol
• Logging
• OpenTelemetry export - separate flow for streaming diagnostics to a collector