How much time does manual agent management take?

Based on user surveys, teams managing 5+ agents manually spend 5-10 hours per week on monitoring, debugging, and maintenance tasks. With ClawHQ, this drops to 1-2 hours per week.

Is ClawHQ worth it for just 2-3 agents?

The free tier covers up to 3 agents, so there is no cost reason not to use it. Even with 2-3 agents, the time saved on monitoring and the visibility into costs and performance makes it worthwhile.

Can I transition from manual management gradually?

Yes. You can connect agents to ClawHQ one at a time. Start with your most critical agent, see the value, then migrate the rest. The process takes about 5 minutes per agent.

ClawHQ vs Managing Agents Manually: Why Dashboards Win

The Manual Management Reality

Let's be honest about what "manual agent management" looks like in practice:

SSH into servers to check if agents are running
Grep through log files to find errors
Check API billing dashboards to track costs (after the fact)
Spreadsheets tracking agent configs and status
Slack messages asking "is the research agent down?"
Scripts cobbled together for basic health checking

It works. Barely. And it breaks down fast as you add more agents.

The Comparison

Monitoring

Manual: SSH + logs + custom scripts. Reactive — you find problems after they've impacted work.

ClawHQ: Real-time dashboard with health status, alerts, and historical data. Proactive — you see problems before they escalate.

Task Management

Manual: CLI commands, cron jobs, and Slack messages to coordinate work. No visibility into task queues or progress.

ClawHQ: Visual Task Board with Kanban view, priority management, and cross-agent task routing. See every task's status at a glance.

Cost Tracking

Manual: Check API provider billing dashboards weekly or monthly. No per-agent or per-task breakdown. Surprise bills are common.

ClawHQ: Real-time cost tracking per agent and per task. Budget alerts. Cost trend analysis. No surprises.

Debugging

Manual: Grep through unstructured logs across multiple servers. Reproduce issues by re-running tasks. Time-consuming and incomplete.

ClawHQ: Centralized, searchable logs with structured traces. See the full execution path of any task — inputs, reasoning, tool calls, outputs.

Scaling

Manual: Each new agent adds operational overhead. At 10+ agents, you're spending more time managing than building.

ClawHQ: Adding a new agent takes one command. The dashboard scales automatically. No additional operational overhead per agent.

Team Collaboration

Manual: No shared view of agent status. Team members have different levels of visibility. Coordination happens through chat and meetings.

ClawHQ: Shared dashboard with role-based access. Everyone sees the same data. Comments and notifications built in.

The ROI Calculation

Let's do the math for a team with 10 agents:

Manual management time: ~8 hours/week × $75/hour (engineering time) = $600/week = $2,400/month
Cost savings from monitoring: Average 15% reduction in unnecessary API costs through better visibility
Incident response improvement: Mean time to detection drops from hours to seconds
ClawHQ Pro plan: $49/month

The math isn't close. Even accounting for some time still spent in ClawHQ, teams report saving 5-8 hours per week after switching from manual management.

When Manual Management Is Fine

To be fair, manual management works when:

You have exactly 1 agent
It runs on your local machine
You're just experimenting
Reliability doesn't matter

For anything beyond that, you need a management layer. And even for experimentation, ClawHQ's free tier gives you better visibility than manual checking.

Making the Switch

Migrating from manual management to ClawHQ is straightforward:

Step 1: Create a ClawHQ account (free)
Step 2: Run openclaw connect --dashboard on each agent (2 min per agent)
Step 3: Configure alerts for critical metrics (10 min)
Step 4: Retire your SSH-and-grep workflow

Most teams complete the migration in under an hour.

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