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An Introduction to StackTach
StackTach was initially created as a browser-based debugging tool for OpenStack Nova. Since that time, StackTach has evolved into a tool that can do debugging, performance monitoring and perform audit, validation and reconcilation of Nova and Glance usage in a manner suitable for billing.
How it works
Nearly all OpenStack components are capable of generating notifications when significant events occur. Notifications are messages placed on the OpenStack queue (generally RabbitMQ) for consumption by downstream systems.
The OpenStack wiki has info on the notification format.
StackTach has a worker that is configured to read these notifications and store them in a database (ideally a database separate from the OpenStack production database). From there, StackTach reviews the stream of notifications to glean usage information and assemble it in an easy-to-query fashion.
Users can inquire on instances, requests, servers, etc using the browser interface or command line tool (Stacky).
To get a general sense of notification adoption across OpenStack projects read this blog post