---
title: Your first week
description: An ordered sequence for getting real value out of ClawMetry — see the spend, set a budget, wire one alert, set retention, then decide whether Guard may act.
keywords: ClawMetry setup guide, agent cost control, agent governance rollout
eyebrow: Get started
---

# Your first week

Installing takes a minute. Getting value takes a handful of deliberate choices.
This is the order that works, and each step is useful on its own if you stop
there.

## Day 1 — look at what is already there

Do nothing but read. The daemon has now ingested your history, so the numbers
are real rather than a sample.

- **Cost → this month.** Which runtime dominates? Which model? Almost everyone
  is surprised by at least one row.
- **Agents.** Every agent on the machine, what it runs, what it costs, whether
  it is alive. Look for things you forgot were running.
- **Activity.** Watch a live session step through. This is the fastest way to
  understand what your agent actually does with a prompt.

If a runtime you use is missing, fix that now — its
[reference page](/docs/runtimes/overview/) names the environment variable.

## Day 2 — set a budget

A budget is worth setting before an alert, because it is the thing that makes
an alert actionable.

```bash
clawmetry proxy config --daily-budget 25 --monthly-budget 400 --action warn
```

Start with `warn`. Move to `block` or `downgrade` once you trust the numbers.
See [Budgets and limits](/docs/cost/budgets/).

## Day 3 — wire exactly one alert

One. The failure mode here is configuring eight rules on day three and muting
all of them by day ten.

Pick the one that would actually have caught your worst recent surprise —
usually a spend velocity rule or a repeated-tool-failure rule. Set it up in
**Alerts**, then send a test so you know the delivery path works.

## Day 4 — set retention

The store grows with your agents. Decide how much history you need.

```bash
clawmetry retention              # what the current window is and why
```

Free tiers cap at 7 days, paid tiers extend it, and
`CLAWMETRY_RETENTION_DAYS` overrides within what your tier allows. See
[Retention](/docs/data/retention/).

## Day 5 — read one bad session end to end

Find a session in Guard or Cost that cost more than it should have. Open it in
Conversations and read it. Then look at what the detectors said about it.

This is the step that changes how you write prompts, and it is the reason the
transcript view separates thinking from replies.

## Week 2 — decide about Guard

Now that you have seen the incidents, decide whether ClawMetry may act on them.

Start in monitor mode. A new policy defaults to `monitor`, which records what
it *would* have done and changes nothing:

```bash
# leave CLAWMETRY_POLICY_ENFORCE unset — the default is 0, dry run
```

Let it run for a few days and read the decision log. If the policy would have
fired on the right sessions and nothing else, then — and only then — turn on
enforcement:

```bash
export CLAWMETRY_POLICY_ENFORCE=1
```

The full model, including escalation ladders and the three locks every action
passes, is in [Policies and escalation](/docs/guard/policies/).

## Week 2 — connect your coding agent

```bash
claude mcp add clawmetry -- clawmetry mcp
```

Then start asking it about its own work. The
[self-diagnosis recipes](/docs/mcp/self-diagnosis/) are the fastest way to see
why this is more than a party trick.

## What to skip at first

- Custom runtime ingest, unless you already have an agent that writes nothing
  to disk.
- The eval suite, until you have a failure you want to stop recurring.
- Multi-node fleet, until you actually have a second node.