validator-debt: total debt display in slack is inconsistent

[karl-dz]

Investigate why the "Total Debt" column in the slack table is not consistently the same number

[RedaRahmani]

hey @karl-dz , i was investigating this issue and after auditing the code paths here’s what i found:
in crates/validator-debt/src/worker/mod.rs, specifically in post_debt_collection_summary_to_slack, it aggregates all total paid and total debt across all DebtCollectionResults without excluding anything, but in post_debt_collections_to_slack it skips epochs when total_validators == 0 or successful_transactions_count == 0. That means the summary can include epochs that never appear in the table, so Total Debt won’t equal the sum of the visible rows.

secondly, the totals can change between runs because of how errors are handled in crates/validator-debt/src/transaction.rs in Transaction::pay_solana_validator_debt. During payment processing, any Err(err) is only logged with eprintln! and then dropped (not pushed into debt_collection_result). Since total_debt and total_validators are computed from debt_collection_result, intermittent RPC/preflight/network failures can make some validators effectively disappear from totals, so the numbers can vary between runs.

what i think should solve this issue is: compute summary totals from the exact same filtered set used to build the table rows (or stop filtering rows), and avoid dropping errors either convert Err into a failed DebtCollectionResult (so it stays visible and counted).

i believe these are the primary code locations causing the “Total Debt” mismatch. If you agree with this direction, I can take it and implement the needed fixes.

[bgm-malbeclabs]

yea that seems like a likely culprit - thanks for taking this on!

[RedaRahmani]

@bgm-malbeclabs Thanks!! I’m on it.