What is OSIRIS JSON

Overview

OSIRIS (Open Specification for Infrastructure Resource Interchange Schema) defines a vendor-neutral JSON format for describing infrastructure resources, their properties and their topological relationships across heterogeneous environments with an extension path for OT where applicable.

As an interchange schema, OSIRIS JSON normalizes exports from diverse sources and enables portable consumption by tools dedicated to diagramming, documentation, inventory/CMDB workflows, audit evidence and integrations without requiring each consumer to implement and maintain vendor-specific parsers.

OSIRIS JSON defines a canonical JSON schema that acts as a neutral middleware between infrastructure data sources and consuming applications. Instead of embedding vendor-specific parsing logic into every tool, OSIRIS JSON adopts a translation-layer approach:

• PRODUCERS (parsers, translators, discovery agents) translate source/vendor representations into OSIRIS JSON documents.
• CONSUMERS (diagramming tools, CMDBs, IPAMs, DCIMs, documentation pipelines) read and process a single, well-defined schema.

This decouples data sources from consuming applications, reducing integration complexity from S×C (S sources × C consumers) to P+C (P producers + C consumers).

This decouples data sources from applications and reduces integration complexity. In an environment with S source systems and C consuming applications, integration effort shifts from S×C direct mappings to S producer mappings (source > OSIRIS) plus C consumer mappings (OSIRIS > application).

The challenge

Infrastructure data is exposed through vendor-specific formats and models, with inconsistent semantics for equivalent concepts identity, properties, relationships and hierarchy. In mixed environments spanning hyperscalers, public cloud, on-prem systems and OT infrastructure, the problem compounds. The result is fragmented sometime high-cost tooling, inconsistent exports and documentation with fragmented or low quality topology that quickly becomes outdated.

Fragmentation consequences

• Integration complexity - Tools must maintain vendor-specific adapters, mappings, and translators.
• High maintenance cost - Vendor-specific APIs and data models evolve, forcing continuous updates to parsers and integrations, which drives up maintenance costs over time.
• Inconsistent topology semantics - Relationships may be implicit, incomplete, or represented differently across sources, making topology comparison and reuse difficult.
• Documentation drift - Manual translation is fragile; documentation is poorly maintained, and diagrams are often of low quality, featuring chaotic layouts that quickly fall out of date.
• Tribal knowledge risk - Without a shared, open specification, critical context often lives in people’s heads. When team members leave, that knowledge goes with them, making systems harder to understand and operate.
• Lock-in risk - Organizations may become dependent on closed, proprietary, or paid normalization solutions that are hard to replace or lack a long-term open vision.

OSIRIS JSON Open Specification approach

• Neutral JSON interchange schema - A vendor-neutral format for exchanging infrastructure resources and topology between systems.
• Producers translate source exports into OSIRIS JSON documents - Parsers/translators/discovery agents map native representations into the OSIRIS schema.
• Consumers implement one schema for many sources - Tools can read a single, well-defined document format across different environments.
• Explicit, first-class topology relationships - Connections, dependencies, containment, and grouping are represented directly so a snapshot can describe what exists and how it relates at a point in time.
• Forward compatibility through safe ignoring of unknown fields - Consumers can ignore unknown properties and extensions without breaking basic processing.
• Extensions are natively supported - A defined mechanism allows vendors and users to enrich documents without breaking interoperability.

Core capabilities

Unified design

Built for heterogeneous IT environments, with a clear extension path for OT and other domains as adoption grows.

Explicit relationships model

First-class representation of connections, dependencies, containment, and other topology relationships.

Grouping constructs

Support for logical and physical grouping that reflects real organizational and architectural structures without forcing a single taxonomy.

Provider attribution

Resources preserve traceability to their source system or provider while using a normalized, vendor-neutral representation.

Extensibility

A defined mechanism for vendor-specific properties and custom resource types without breaking compatibility.

Three-Level validation

Structural (schema), semantic and domain validation improving consistency and data quality when validation tooling is applied.

Design principles

Static snapshot format

OSIRIS JSON is a static snapshot interchange format. It captures what exists and how it relates at a point in time. It was not designed as a real-time monitoring system, a deployment tool, or an Infrastructure-as-Code engine.

What OSIRIS JSON is NOT

Not real-time telemetry and monitoring

OSIRIS JSON describes topology and inventory state, not time-series metrics, logs or observability data. Projects like Prometheus, Grafana, Zabbix, OpenTelemetry address telemetry concerns.

Not infrastructure deployment and orchestration

OSIRIS JSON is not an infrastructure-as-code language or a deployment specification. Projects like Terraform, CloudFormation or TOSCA Oasis address deployment workflows.

Not configuration management

OSIRIS JSON does not define or enforce desired state configuration for resources. Configuration management systems like Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Salt serve this purpose.

Not change tracking and history

OSIRIS JSON represents a point-in-time snapshot. Tracking changes over time is the responsibility of producing and consuming systems.

Not authentication, authorization and access policies

OSIRIS JSON may carry metadata describing boundaries or ownership, but it does not define access control mechanisms or policies.

Cost and billing information

Detailed billing and financial modeling are outside the core schema scope, although cost-related metadata may be included by extension.

Document structure

OSIRIS JSON documents are JSON objects. In Specification v1.0.0, the top-level object is defined around three fields: version, metadata, and topology. An optional $schema field may be included to reference the schema URI.

Note

This is a top-level OSIRIS JSON schema outline. $defs are omitted here for top-level readability, refer to the canonical URI for the full schema.

The OSIRIS JSON core schema defines:

{
  "$schema": "https://json-schema.org/draft/2020-12/schema#",
  "$id": "https://osirisjson.org/schema/v1.0/osiris.schema.json",
  "title": "OSIRIS JSON Core Schema v1.0",
  "description": "OSIRIS Open Specification for Infrastructure Resource Interchange Schema. This schema encodes baseline interoperability requirements; additional semantic rules (e.g. referential integrity, uniqueness) are validated by tooling.",
  "type": "object",
  "required": ["version", "metadata", "topology"],
  "properties": {
    "$schema": {
      "type": "string",
      "description": "Optional JSON Schema dialect reference for OSIRIS JSON documents.",
      "format": "uri"
    },
    "version": {
      "type": "string",
      "description": "OSIRIS JSON specification version of this document (semver). For the v1.0 schema endpoint, any 1.x.y is allowed.",
      "pattern": "^1\\.[0-9]+\\.[0-9]+$"
    },
    "metadata": {
      "$ref": "#/$defs/metadata"
    },
    "topology": {
      "$ref": "#/$defs/topology"
    }
  },
  "additionalProperties": true,
  "$defs": {
    "osirisType": {},
    "providerName": {},
    "namespaceKey": {},
    "tags": {},
    "freeformObject": {},
    "extensions": {},
    "provider": {},
    "resource": {},
    "connectionDirection": {},
    "connectionType": {},
    "connection": {},
    "group": {},
    "topology": {},
    "metadataGenerator": {},
    "metadataScope": {},
    "metadata": {}
  }
}

topology.resources

Uniquely identifiable infrastructure entities with properties and provider attribution.

topology.connections

Explicit relationships and direction between resources (network, dependency, containment, data flow, etc.).

topology.groups

Logical or physical collections that organize resources (e.g. VPC, subnet, rack, data center).

Validation and interoperability

Schema conformance

OSIRIS v1.0 documents must conform to the JSON Schema. Consumers should ignore unknown fields for forward compatibility and apply version compatibility rules before processing.

Next steps

Read the specificationBrowse the OSIRIS JSON Specification

Explore OSIRIS JSON examplesSample OSIRIS JSON documents for IT and OT infrastructure

Getting started with producersLearn how to get a first snapshot of your infrastructure with OSIRIS