When something goes wrong, you should climb rungs in order.
openclaw status is your first rung. It shows your version, active model, gateway state, and connected channels. For a full shareable report, use openclaw status --all.
Your second rung is openclaw doctor. It validates your config and catches anything wrong: bad JSON, unknown keys, type mismatches, legacy fields. Run openclaw doctor --fix to auto-repair what it finds.
The third rung is openclaw logs --follow. This streams live output as you reproduce a problem. Logs are stored under /tmp/openclaw/, one file per day. Use openclaw logs --limit 200 for a fixed window of the last lines.