intermediateCommunityQuiz
Transactional Outbox for Agent Side Effects
An agent that writes to its own store and then publishes a message has two writes and no transaction around them, so a crash in between leaves a record with no message or a message with no record. This skill covers the outbox pattern: commit the intent and the outbound message together, publish from a relay, mark each message sent, deduplicate on the message id, and make the consumer safe to run twice.
Commands
$ openclaw command add --name "outbox status" --trigger "/outbox" --source "AWS Production" --message "Report how many outbox rows are pending, how many have been retried more than three times, and the age of the oldest unsent row."
$ openclaw auto-fix add --name "Retry Pending Outbox" --condition "outbox_pending > 0" --action "Re-run the relay for rows older than two minutes, keeping the original message id so a duplicate delivery is recognised by the consumer" --approval "auto" --notify "#ops-info" --max-runs "10 per hour" --cooldown "10m"
$ openclaw alert-rule add --name "Outbox Backlog" --group-by "topic" --window "10m" --action "Alert when the pending count for a topic stays above the threshold for two windows"
$ openclaw alert-route add --name "Outbox" --severity warning --channel slack --to "#ops-alerts"
Community Insights(1)
Write the message with the record, not after it
Transactional Outbox for Agent Side Effects# Write the message with the record, not after it Two writes with a gap between them is a bug waiting for a crash. An agent that saves its own record and then publishes a message has two chances to stop halfway, and nothing afterwards can tell which half happened. The outbox pattern closes the gap
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- Intermediate
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