Verify a deployment with the dump

Oslo type names and payload members differ per OpenStack release. This guide prints what one deployment actually publishes, before a collector is pointed at it, and compares that against the entries the mapping table carries.

Before you start

• The broker's AMQP URL. The dump reads the AMQP variables alone: no cloud, no Reporting API, no token and no outbox (the collector's modes). The account in the URL needs the permissions of create the broker account, the amq\.gen-.* alternative included, which is the dump's queue.
• A project on the cloud where you may boot an instance, create a volume, allocate a floating IP, upload an image and create a load balancer, and the openstack client configured for it.
• jq, for reading the JSON lines the dump prints.
• The collector settings page, which lists the three variables this guide exports.

Start the dump

1. Export the AMQP variables and start the dump, keeping its lines in a file:

   export TALLY_OSC_AMQP_URL='amqp://user:password@rabbitmq.example:5672/'
   export TALLY_OSC_EXCHANGES=nova,neutron,openstack,glance,octavia
   export TALLY_OSC_TOPICS=notifications.info
   tally-openstack-collector --dump | tee dump.jsonl

   {"exchange":"nova","routing_key":"notifications.info","message_id":"e3d6f0f4-5b2f-4b1a-9a2b-1c3d5e7f9a0b","event_type":"compute.instance.create.end","timestamp":"2026-03-01T10:00:00Z","payload":{"instance_id":"1a2b3c4d-5e6f-4a7b-8c9d-0e1f2a3b4c5d","tenant_id":"9c4a1b2d3e4f5061728394a5b6c7d8e9","vcpus":4,"memory_mb":8192,"root_gb":40,"ephemeral_gb":40,"instance_type":"m1.large"}}

   The dump replaces the value of every member whose name contains password, token, secret or connection_info with [redacted]. A credential under another name is printed as it arrived, and so are project ids, user ids, host names and addresses (what the dump can and cannot show). Keep dump.jsonl off tickets and shared storage, and delete it in the last step of this guide.

   The dump consumes through a server-named, exclusive, auto-deleting queue, so the durable tally-notifications queue, Ceilometer and a collector running at the same time keep receiving their own copies. An interrupted dump leaves no queue behind.

Perform the billable operations

1. In a second shell, run the operations that are meant to be billed:

   openstack server create --flavor m1.large --image cirros --network private dump-check
   openstack server delete dump-check
   openstack volume create --size 1 dump-check
   openstack volume set --size 2 dump-check
   openstack volume delete dump-check
   openstack floating ip create public
   openstack floating ip delete <address>
   openstack image create --file cirros.img dump-check
   openstack image delete dump-check
   openstack loadbalancer create --vip-subnet-id private-subnet --name dump-check
   openstack loadbalancer delete dump-check

2. Stop the dump with Ctrl-C once the last operation has been published, and count what it collected:

   wc -l < dump.jsonl

   15

Compare against the mapping

1. Reduce the file to the event types the deployment published and compare that list against the oslo types on the notification mapping page:

   jq -r '.event_type' dump.jsonl | sort | uniq -c

      1 compute.instance.create.end
      1 compute.instance.delete.end
      1 floatingip.create.end
      1 floatingip.delete.end
      1 image.create
      1 image.delete
      1 image.upload
      3 null
      1 octavia.loadbalancer.create.end
      1 octavia.loadbalancer.delete.end
      1 volume.create.end
      1 volume.delete.end
      1 volume.resize.end

   A line the parser refused carries no event_type and counts under null.

2. Compare the payload members each entry reads against the payloads printed. For an instance those are instance_id, tenant_id, vcpus, memory_mb, root_gb, ephemeral_gb and instance_type:

   jq -c 'select(.event_type == "compute.instance.create.end") | .payload
     | {instance_id, tenant_id, vcpus, memory_mb, root_gb, ephemeral_gb, instance_type}' dump.jsonl

   {"instance_id":"1a2b3c4d-5e6f-4a7b-8c9d-0e1f2a3b4c5d","tenant_id":"9c4a1b2d3e4f5061728394a5b6c7d8e9","vcpus":4,"memory_mb":8192,"root_gb":40,"ephemeral_gb":40,"instance_type":"m1.large"}

   A member printed as null is one the release names differently, and the other resource types read volume_id, size, volume_type, floatingip.id, owner, loadbalancer_id, id and project_id. An octavia payload names no listeners and no pools on any release, so neither is a member to look for.

3. Compare the deliveries against the recorded samples under internal/providers/openstack/testdata/golden/, whose notifications hold one recorded envelope each and whose events hold the event each envelope maps to. Where the deployment diverges, edit the mapping entry and the fixture pair for that type. A type the table does not carry is counted as skipped and recorded nowhere.

Check the result

1. The dump prints one JSON line per delivery, carrying the exchange, the routing key, the message id, the event type, the timestamp and the payload:

   jq -c 'del(.payload)' dump.jsonl | head -2

   {"exchange":"nova","routing_key":"notifications.info","message_id":"e3d6f0f4-5b2f-4b1a-9a2b-1c3d5e7f9a0b","event_type":"compute.instance.create.end","timestamp":"2026-03-01T10:00:00Z"}
   {"exchange":"openstack","routing_key":"notifications.info","message_id":"b7c8d9e0-1f2a-4b3c-8d4e-5f6a7b8c9d0e","event_type":"volume.create.end","timestamp":"2026-03-01T10:04:11Z"}

2. The members the dump redacted in a parsed payload are listed with the path each stands at. An empty list means no parsed delivery carried one. A refused body carries its redactions inside the unparseable string, which the next step prints:

   jq -r 'paths(. == "[redacted]") | map(tostring) | join(".")' dump.jsonl | sort | uniq -c

         2 payload.request_spec.instance_properties.pci_requests._context.auth_token

3. A body the parser refuses prints under unparseable, with the same members replaced by [redacted] and the rest cut off after 512 bytes:

   jq -c 'select(.unparseable) | {exchange, unparseable}' dump.jsonl

   {"exchange":"nova","unparseable":"{\"_context_auth_token\": \"[redacted]\", \"_context_password\": \"[redacted]\", \"event_type\": \"compute.instance.update\", \"payload\": {"}

4. A body that is not JSON at all, a msgpack-serialized notification for one, is reported by its size and not printed, and so is an envelope whose oslo.message is not JSON:

   jq -r 'select(.unparseable) | .unparseable' dump.jsonl | grep -E 'bytes (that are|whose oslo\.message is) not JSON'

   2114 bytes that are not JSON
   187 bytes whose oslo.message is not JSON

5. Delete the file once the comparison is done:

   rm dump.jsonl