AI Costs Are an Infrastructure Problem
If you're a DevOps or platform engineer, you already monitor CPU, memory, network, and storage costs. AI agent costs are the same category — infrastructure spend that needs visibility, governance, and alerting. The difference is that AI costs are far less predictable and far easier to accidentally 10x.
ClawHQ brings AI costs into your existing operational workflow.
OTLP Integration
ClawHQ speaks OpenTelemetry natively — the same protocol your Grafana, Datadog, and Prometheus stacks already understand. Setup is standard OTLP exporter configuration.
For OpenClaw gateway:
telemetry:
  otlp:
    endpoint: https://app.clawhq.co/api/v1/otlp/metrics
    headers:
      x-api-key: $CLAWHQ_API_KEY
For any OTLP-compatible agent, use the standard OpenTelemetry SDK with ClawHQ as the exporter endpoint.
Grafana Forwarding
Already have Grafana? ClawHQ can forward cost metrics to your existing dashboards. On Team plan and above:
- Forward all cost metrics to your Prometheus/Grafana stack
- Build custom dashboards combining AI costs with infrastructure metrics
- Unified alerting across infrastructure and AI spend
Budget Governance for Platform Teams
As a platform engineer, you need to give teams AI resources without giving them blank checks:
- Per-team budgets: Each team gets a monthly AI budget
- Automatic enforcement: Throttle or suspend agents that exceed limits
- Self-service visibility: Teams see their own costs via RBAC dashboards
- Chargeback reports: Automated monthly reports for finance
This is the same model you use for cloud compute — now applied to AI.
Alert Escalation
ClawHQ alerts integrate with your incident management workflow:
- Low severity: Slack notification for daily budget warning
- Medium severity: PagerDuty alert for cost spike detection
- High severity: Agent auto-suspended + PagerDuty page for runaway spend
IaC and GitOps
Manage ClawHQ configuration as code:
- Store budget and alert configs in version control
- Deploy changes through your existing CI/CD pipeline
- Review budget changes via pull requests
- Audit trail for all configuration changes
Key Metrics for DevOps
Monitor these in your ClawHQ dashboard:
- Cost per agent per day: Spot anomalies early
- Fleet cost trend: Is total spend growing faster than agent count?
- Cost per team: Are budgets being respected?
- Model cost distribution: Are expensive models being used where cheap ones would work?
- Budget utilization: How close is each team to their limit?
