- Updated: March 24, 2026
- 2 min read
Diagnosing a Latency Spike with OpenClaw’s Unified Grafana Dashboard
# Diagnosing a Latency Spike with OpenClaw’s Unified Grafana Dashboard
**Scenario**
Our e‑commerce platform experienced a sudden latency spike during a high‑traffic flash‑sale event. Customers reported page loads taking 8‑10 seconds instead of the usual sub‑second response. The incident was flagged by our monitoring system, and the SRE team was tasked with identifying the root cause as quickly as possible.
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## Step‑by‑step SRE walkthrough using the Unified Metrics‑Logs‑Traces Dashboard
1. **Open the Unified Dashboard**
– Navigate to the OpenClaw Grafana instance and select the *Unified Metrics‑Logs‑Traces* dashboard.
2. **Zoom into the time window**
– Set the time range to the exact period when the latency spike was reported (e.g., `2024‑03‑20 14:00 – 14:15 UTC`).
3. **Inspect the latency metric**
– In the *Latency (p95)* panel, notice a sharp upward curve coinciding with the spike.
– Hover over the peak to see the exact value and the affected service (`frontend‑svc`).
4. **Correlate with request rate**
– Check the *Requests per Second* panel. The request rate remains stable, indicating the issue is not traffic‑related.
5. **Drill down to error rates**
– The *Error Rate* panel shows a modest increase in 5xx responses from the `payment‑svc`.
– Click on the error bar to filter logs for that service during the spike.
6. **Search logs for anomalies**
– In the *Logs* tab, filter by `service=”payment‑svc”` and `level=error`.
– A recurring log entry appears: `DB connection pool exhausted – timeout after 30s`.
7. **Trace the offending request**
– Switch to the *Traces* panel and select a trace that includes the error.
– The trace reveals a long‑running SQL query (`SELECT … FROM orders WHERE status=’pending’`) that takes >25 seconds.
8. **Identify the root cause**
– The query is missing an index on the `status` column, causing a full table scan under heavy load.
– The database connection pool exhaustion further amplifies latency.
9. **Mitigation steps**
– Deploy a hot‑fix adding the missing index.
– Increase the connection pool size temporarily.
– Restart the `payment‑svc` pods to clear stuck connections.
10. **Post‑mortem documentation**
– Record the incident timeline, root cause, and remediation steps in the incident tracker.
– Add a monitoring alert for *DB connection pool utilization* to catch similar issues early.
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## Internal reference
For more details on setting up OpenClaw and the unified dashboard, see our guide: [/host-openclaw](/host-openclaw/).
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*Prepared by the UBOS SRE team.*