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

Category	Description	Auto-logged
deploy	Deployments, upgrades, rollbacks	Via hooks
incident	Incidents, outages, degradations	Via watchdog integration
config	Configuration changes	Via hooks
maintenance	Scheduled maintenance, cleanup	Manual or cron
security	Security events, audits, patches	Via security skills
note	General observations, decisions	Manual

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