Managing Gateway Events with openclaw system

I often find myself wondering if my background processes are actually doing what they should. It is frustrating when you need to inject a specific instruction into a session or check if a node is still alive without digging through messy logs. I prefer having a direct way to talk to the system level of the Gateway to keep things moving.

The openclaw system commands are exactly what I use for this. They let you handle events, heartbeats, and presence entries without any guesswork.

What You’ll Need

• A running Gateway reachable by your current configuration (local or remote).

Quick Start

If you want to get moving in under five minutes, here is the basic path. These commands help you interact with the main session and monitor the system status.

1. Inject a system event immediately Use this to put a line into your prompt right now.

   openclaw system event --text "Check for urgent follow-ups" --mode now

2. Check the last heartbeat Verify when the system last ticked.

   openclaw system heartbeat last

3. Enable heartbeats If you previously paused them, turn them back on with this.

   openclaw system heartbeat enable

4. View system presence See the nodes and instances the Gateway currently recognizes.

   openclaw system presence

Managing Events

The system event command is great for adding context to the main session. By default, it uses next-heartbeat, which waits for the next scheduled tick. If you are in a hurry, I recommend using --mode now to trigger the heartbeat immediately.

If you need to process the output with other tools, you can add the --json flag to get machine-readable data.

Heartbeat and Presence

Heartbeats are the pulse of your system. You can pause them using openclaw system heartbeat disable if you need to stop the ticks, and use enable to resume.

The system presence command gives you a list of status lines for nodes and instances. This is the quickest way to see what the Gateway knows about at this moment.

Troubleshooting

My system events disappeared after I restarted the Gateway. System events are ephemeral. The Gateway does not persist them across restarts, so you will need to enqueue them again if the system goes down.

The heartbeat is not injecting my events. Check if heartbeats are paused. You can run openclaw system heartbeat enable to make sure they are active. Also, ensure your Gateway is actually running and reachable.

If you have more specific questions about your setup, try the AI Setup Assistant.

What’s Next

• Gateway Configuration Guide
• Command Line Interface Reference