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Short guide to verify channel connectivity without guessing.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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).

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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.