Track Token Usage Per Cron Job: OpenClaw 2026.2.17 Adds Usage Telemetry for Scheduled Runs

If you're running scheduled tasks with OpenClaw's cron system, you've probably wondered: "How much are these background jobs actually costing me?" Until now, getting per-job token usage meant digging through logs manually or making educated guesses.

OpenClaw 2026.2.17 changes that with built-in usage telemetry for cron runs.

What's New

Every cron job run now logs model/provider usage telemetry directly in the run logs and webhook payloads. This includes:

• Input tokens consumed by the prompt
• Output tokens generated by the model
• Model and provider used for the run
• Cost data (when available from the provider)

If you're using webhook delivery for your cron jobs (via delivery.mode = "webhook"), this telemetry data gets included in the webhook payload automatically.

Local Usage Report Script

Even better, this release includes a local usage report script for aggregating token usage by job. You can now get a breakdown like:

• Job "daily-summary" used 45,000 tokens this week ($0.67)
• Job "morning-briefing" used 120,000 tokens this week ($1.80)
• Job "health-check" used 2,500 tokens this week ($0.04)

This makes it trivial to identify which scheduled tasks are eating through your API budget and optimize accordingly.

Why This Matters

Cron jobs are easy to set and forget. A quick "check my email every hour" task seems cheap until you realize it's been running GPT-4 with full context loading 24 times a day. Multiply that by a few jobs and you can end up with surprise bills.

With per-job telemetry, you can:

1. Identify expensive jobs before they blow up your budget
2. Optimize prompts for jobs that run frequently
3. Choose appropriate models — maybe that hourly check doesn't need Opus
4. Track costs over time with webhook integrations to your own dashboards

How to Use It

If you're already running cron jobs, usage telemetry is automatic in 2026.2.17. Check your run logs or webhook payloads for the new usage fields.

For the usage report script, look in the OpenClaw scripts directory or run:

openclaw cron runs --job your-job-id

The output now includes usage details per run.

Combine With Webhook Delivery

For production setups, consider combining this with the new webhook delivery mode (also in 2026.2.17) that supports dedicated cron.webhookToken authentication:

cron:
  webhookToken: "your-secure-token"
  jobs:
    - id: daily-report
      schedule: "0 9 * * *"
      delivery:
        mode: webhook
        url: https://your-dashboard.com/cron-usage

Now every completed run posts its usage data to your own endpoint, ready for aggregation and alerting.

Reference: OpenClaw v2026.2.17 Release Notes

Thanks to @HankAndTheCrew for contributing this feature (#18172)!

Running scheduled AI tasks? Keep an eye on those tokens—your wallet will thank you.