Monitoring Channel Health on macOS

I hate it when background processes fail without a word. You assume your connection is active, but you are actually offline. It is a waste of time to manually verify status every few minutes just to make sure things are working.

I prefer having immediate visibility into whether my channels are healthy. Here is how I handle health checks on the macOS app.

What You’ll Need

• The macOS menu bar app.
• A linked WhatsApp or Telegram channel.

Quick Start

The app monitors Baileys health automatically, but you can also check it manually.

1. Check the Menu Bar Dot: The status dot color tells you the current state. Green means you are linked and the socket opened recently. Orange indicates the app is connecting or retrying. Red means you are logged out or the probe failed.
2. Read the Status Line: Look at the secondary line in the menu. It reads “linked · auth 12m” or displays the specific failure reason.
3. Trigger a Manual Probe: Click the “Run Health Check” menu item to start an on-demand check.
4. Review Settings: Open the General tab to see the health card. This shows the session-store path, last check time, and error codes. You can also use the Channels tab to see status and controls for WhatsApp or Telegram.

The app runs openclaw health --json every 60 seconds. It caches the last good snapshot and the last error separately so the UI loads fast and does not flicker.

Troubleshooting

If the menu bar does not give you enough detail, I recommend using the CLI or checking the local logs.

Run CLI Status Commands You can get a deeper look at the gateway health by running these commands:

openclaw status
openclaw status --deep
openclaw health --json

Check the Logs If you see a web-heartbeat or web-reconnect error, tail the log files located here:

tail -f /tmp/openclaw/openclaw-*.log

Still having trouble? Ask the AI Setup Assistant.

What’s Next

• Gateway health