Ops Journal

ops-journal — Automated Ops Logging & Incident Timeline for OpenClaw

Structured operational journal that captures deployments, incidents, changes, and decisions. Creates a searchable ops log with incident timeline reconstruction and automated postmortem generation.

Quick Start

# Initialize journal
python3 scripts/journal.py init

# Log an event
python3 scripts/journal.py log "Upgraded nginx to 1.25" --category deploy
python3 scripts/journal.py log "Disk cleanup, freed 5GB" --category maintenance --tags storage

# Start an incident
python3 scripts/journal.py incident open "API latency spike" --severity high

# Resolve an incident
python3 scripts/journal.py incident resolve INC-001 "Root cause: disk full on /var"

# Search logs
python3 scripts/journal.py search "nginx" --since 7d
python3 scripts/journal.py search --category incident --severity high

# Generate reports
python3 scripts/journal.py summary --period week
python3 scripts/journal.py timeline INC-001

# Export
python3 scripts/journal.py export --format markdown --since 30d

Entry Categories

Severity Levels

• info — Normal operations (default)
• warn — Something worth noting
• high — Important event requiring attention
• critical — Major incident or outage

Commands

log — Create a journal entry

python3 scripts/journal.py log "message" [--category CAT] [--severity SEV] [--tags tag1,tag2]

incident — Incident management

python3 scripts/journal.py incident open "description" [--severity SEV]
python3 scripts/journal.py incident resolve ID "resolution"
python3 scripts/journal.py incident list [--status open|resolved|all]
python3 scripts/journal.py incident show ID

search — Search journal entries

python3 scripts/journal.py search [query] [--category CAT] [--severity SEV] [--since Nd|Nw|Nm] [--limit N]

summary — Generate period summary

python3 scripts/journal.py summary [--period day|week|month] [--json]

timeline — Incident timeline

python3 scripts/journal.py timeline ID [--format markdown|json]

export — Export journal

python3 scripts/journal.py export [--format markdown|json|csv] [--since Nd] [--output file]

stats — Journal statistics

python3 scripts/journal.py stats [--period month]

Output Modes

• Human: Colored terminal output with category icons and severity highlighting
• JSON: Machine-readable output for integration (--json)
• Markdown: Report-ready markdown for sharing (--format markdown)
• CSV: Spreadsheet-compatible export (--format csv)

Integration with infra-watchdog

When infra-watchdog detects an issue, ops-journal can auto-log it:

# In a cron or hook:
python3 scripts/journal.py log "Monitor CRITICAL: Gateway down" --category incident --severity critical

OpenClaw Cron Integration

# Daily summary at 09:00
python3 scripts/journal.py summary --period day --json

# Weekly digest on Monday
python3 scripts/journal.py summary --period week

Storage

All data stored in ~/.openclaw/workspace/ops-journal/:

• journal.db — SQLite database with all entries
• incidents/ — Individual incident files (markdown)

Files

• scripts/journal.py — Main journal engine
• SKILL.md — This file