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A monitoring extension contributes observability assets to clawker’s stack — the OpenSearch indices a telemetry stream lands in, the collector routing that sends the right records there, ingest pipelines, and dashboards. Authoring one means writing a manifest that declares your log lanes and metric shaping, plus the OpenSearch and OpenSearch Dashboards artifacts you ship. This page covers the extension directory; see Monitoring Extensions for selecting and consuming them, Monitoring for the stack itself, and Authoring bundles for packaging.

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Directory layout

An extension is a directory whose name is the extension’s component name:
Place it in a loose convention directory to use it immediately, or inside a bundle’s monitoring/ directory to distribute it:
The claude-code extension shipped with clawker is the best working reference for the full directory — its index template, ingest pipeline, and dashboard saved objects.

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The manifest

monitoring.yaml declares the log lanes the extension owns and any collector-side metric shaping:

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logs

The OpenSearch log lanes this extension owns — at least one is required, since an extension exists to land telemetry somewhere. Each lane declares:

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metrics

Optional collector-side shaping for the extension’s metrics on the shared metrics pipeline. Omit it entirely when your metrics need no reshaping.
The OpenSearch SQL plugin’s direct-query Prometheus connector errors on any metric series carrying a label literally named type. If your metrics use a type label, rename it (for example from: type, to: kind) so the Dashboards Metrics UI can read it. See Monitoring for the full note.

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The OpenSearch and Dashboards artifacts

The directories alongside the manifest are applied idempotently to the running stack each clawker monitor up:
  • index-templates/ — index templates so the extension’s indices get the right field mappings at first ingest.
  • ingest-pipelines/ — ingest pipelines the extension needs.
  • saved-objects/ — OpenSearch Dashboards index patterns, visualizations, and dashboards, imported into the Clawker workspace.
  • ism-policies/ — only when a lane declares retention: custom: the extension’s own retention policy files, scoped to its indices.

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How consumption works

A project selects the extension in monitor.extensions. clawker monitor up seeds it when it brings the stack up; on a stack that is already running, clawker monitor reload is the apply — it seeds the selection, re-renders the collector config, and recreates the collector. There is no host-side registry — the active set is a projection of the project you seed from, and the collector routes from the union of every extension ever seeded. See Monitoring Extensions.

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Validating

Bundle an extension and validate it before publishing:
Validation loads each extension the same way clawker monitor up does, so a malformed monitoring.yaml fails here instead of at seed time.