Run Observer

🔍 Native OpenClaw observability plugin — track every token dollar precisely, and pinpoint exactly why your agent went silent.

Why Run Observer?

💰 Know Exactly What Every Run Costs

Ever wonder how much that agent run actually cost you? Run Observer shows two cost perspectives side by side so you never have to guess:

• Reported Cost — the billing amount your model provider returns in usage.cost. This is the closest number to what actually shows up on your invoice.
• Estimated Cost — computed locally from token usage buckets (input, output, cacheRead, cacheWrite) multiplied by the best available pricing table. When your provider doesn't report billing data, this keeps cost visibility alive.

The viewer displays both in a compact $0.0042($0.0040) badge, letting you cross-check and catch billing anomalies at a glance. Why might they differ? Providers can round, bundle, or discount charges in ways raw token counts alone can't capture, and the local estimate depends on the pricing catalog available at capture time.

🔧 Pinpoint Why Your Agent Stopped Responding

Sometimes OpenClaw just... stops. No error, no output, just silence. Instead of guessing, you need to see exactly what happened inside the engine.

Run Observer captures the full input/output chain for every run: system prompt → user messages → model response (or the absence of one). When your agent goes silent, you can immediately see:

• Did the request actually get sent?
• What did the model return — or did it return nothing at all?
• Error details, completion status, duration, and all run metadata

Stop guessing. Start debugging with full visibility.

Install

Assumes OpenClaw is already installed.

From ClawHub (recommended)

openclaw plugins install clawhub:openclaw-run-observer

From npm

openclaw plugins install npm:openclaw-run-observer

Note: On newer OpenClaw versions, a bare package name is checked against ClawHub first and falls back to npm if not found. Use the clawhub: or npm: prefix if you want the source to be unambiguous.

Quick Start

1. Verify the plugin is installed:

   openclaw plugins inspect run-observer
   

2. Start the gateway:

   openclaw gateway run --bind loopback --allow-unconfigured
   

   If the gateway is already running, restart it instead:

   openclaw gateway restart
   

3. Open the local viewer:

   openclaw run-observer url
   

   Open the printed URL in a browser on the same machine running OpenClaw. The viewer updates live as new runs arrive.

4. (Optional) Quick health check:

   URL="$(openclaw run-observer url)"
   curl --max-time 5 -s -o /tmp/run-observer.html -w 'HTTP %{http_code}\n' "$URL"
   

   HTTP 200 means everything is working.

Usage

Once installed and the gateway is running, the viewer automatically captures all runs. In the browser you get:

• Sidebar — all runs listed in reverse chronological order with model, agent, channel icons, and cost badges
• Detail panel — expand any run to see the full prompt chain, model response, token usage, duration, and error details
• Live updates — new runs are pushed to the page in real time, no manual refresh needed

Rotate the access token

openclaw run-observer rotate-token

Rotating the token invalidates any previously shared viewer links.

Updating

openclaw plugins update run-observer

Or update all plugins at once:

openclaw plugins update --all

Cost Model Details

Why two cost numbers?

	Reported Cost	Estimated Cost
Source	Provider-returned usage.cost	Local token counts × pricing table
Accuracy	Closest to your actual invoice	Best-effort approximation
Use case	Day-to-day cost tracking	Fallback when provider omits billing data

Estimated pricing lookup order

1. OpenClaw's local models.json cost data in the state directory
2. Plugin/runtime config model pricing
3. Cached OpenRouter pricing catalog (with best-effort remote refresh when needed)

If no matching pricing entry is found for the token buckets used by the run, estimated cost shows as n/a.

Security & Privacy

• The viewer only accepts loopback connections — not reachable from outside your machine
• All requests must include the current Run Observer access token
• Captured prompts, outputs, and context stay on the local machine under the OpenClaw state directory
• The session list may fetch channel icons from https://cdn.simpleicons.org and provider icons from https://unpkg.com/@lobehub/icons-static-png@latest/light; the viewer does not send telemetry
• This repository contains source code only — no runtime data, access tokens, or local state

Compatibility

This package declares compatibility through the openclaw.compat metadata in package.json. The published package should track the OpenClaw plugin API and minimum gateway version listed there.

Development

pnpm install
pnpm run check

Build output is emitted to dist/:

pnpm run build

For local plugin development, a watch loop rebuilds on TypeScript changes and restarts the gateway after each successful build:

pnpm run dev

Release

1. Update the version in package.json

2. Run pnpm run check

3. Commit:

   git add .
   git commit -m "chore(release): prepare vX.Y.Z"
   

4. Create and push the tag:

   git tag -a vX.Y.Z -m "vX.Y.Z"
   git push origin main --follow-tags
   

Pushing vX.Y.Z triggers CI to publish to both npm and ClawHub.