An ordered list of rules on a router, switch or firewall that permits or denies traffic by addresses, ports and protocols; the last rule is usually an implicit deny.
In REAP The home page’s illustrative P1 is an ACL whose object group was edited: traffic that no longer matched fell to the final deny. Rule hit counts read twice, seconds apart, are the evidence that proves it.
Term page →Two devices arranged so one carries the service and the other takes over on failure: firewalls, VPN gateways, load balancers, core routers. “HA” for short.
In REAP Standby sync, configuration drift between the pair and whether a failover has ever been exercised are the resilience checks REAP runs; an out-of-sync standby protects nothing.
Term page →The programmatic way one system reads from or writes to another, usually over HTTPS with a token or key; REST APIs exchange JSON.
In REAP Every REAP integration is an API integration with the narrowest scope that does the job: read scope on controllers and cloud accounts, write scope only for the work notes REAP adds to a ticket.
Term page →A physically separate data center within a cloud region. Running across more than one zone keeps a service up when one zone fails.
In REAP REAP Cloud runs across availability zones on AWS (opens in a new tab) in U.S. regions with encrypted, region-redundant backups; the recovery objectives are stated in the subscription agreement.
Term page →The routing protocol that connects networks to each other and to the internet and cloud providers, exchanging reachable prefixes between autonomous systems.
In REAP BGP sessions, received and advertised prefixes and route changes are evidence for WAN, cloud-interconnect and data-center investigations.
Term page →The approved period in which a change may be made or a device restarted, agreed in advance so that impact is expected and watched.
In REAP Before-and-after verification of one real change window is a Pilot deliverable; the guides on this site run every state-changing command only inside an approved maintenance window.
Term page →The text interface of a network device: show commands that read state and configuration commands that change it, over SSH or a console.
In REAP Read-only show commands are REAP’s main evidence source; every command and its output are kept with the conclusion they support. Configuration commands run only inside an approved runbook.
Term page →A vendor’s cloud-hosted management plane for wireless, switching or SD-WAN estates (Juniper Mist (opens in a new tab), HPE Aruba (opens in a new tab) Central, Cisco Meraki (opens in a new tab)), reached through an API rather than device by device.
In REAP Available integrations: REAP reads network context, inventory and events from these controllers alongside the devices it reaches directly.
Term page →The networking objects inside a public cloud account: virtual networks (VPC on AWS (opens in a new tab), VNet on Azure (opens in a new tab)), subnets, route tables, security groups, gateways, transit gateways and VPN connections.
In REAP Read with read-only cloud roles for AWS (opens in a new tab) and Azure (opens in a new tab) today, so hybrid paths between a site and a cloud workload can be traced and verified; GCP (opens in a new tab) network discovery is not available today.
Term page →The ITSM’s inventory of configuration items (devices, applications, services) and the relationships between them.
In REAP Optional enrichment: CMDB records give REAP’s investigations business context (which service runs behind which device). NetBox (opens in a new tab) reconciliation is On request.
Source: ITIL (Axelos)
Term page →Frames received with a bad checksum, usually a sign of a failing cable, optic or port rather than a configuration problem.
In REAP In REAP’s troubleshooting moment, input and CRC errors on the interface are checked before protocol settings, because a physical fault drops hello packets too.
Term page →DHCP hands out IP addresses to devices; a DHCP relay (an “IP helper address” on a router) forwards those requests from a VLAN to a DHCP server somewhere else.
In REAP The illustrative change verification on this site finds a missing helper address on one core after an upgrade: a regression that would surface only on the next failover.
Term page →The domain name system: the service that turns names into addresses. When it fails, everything that depends on names looks broken at once.
In REAP A DNS failure is a classic “everything is down” symptom whose cause lies elsewhere; REAP’s evidence separates the name-resolution failure from the path.
Term page →Enterprise resource planning (orders, inventory, finance) and manufacturing execution systems (what the plant is producing right now): the business applications whose traffic a plant network carries.
In REAP The illustrative P1 drops ERP return traffic to order entry; the illustrative resilience finding protects MES and plant telemetry with a QoS class on the backup circuit. Both show why a network incident is a business incident.
Term page →Passing an incident from the team that took the first call to a more senior engineer or a vendor because it could not be resolved at the first level.
In REAP The number a pilot watches: how many incidents still need a senior engineer or a vendor case when tier 1 has an evidence-backed answer in front of it.
Term page →VXLAN carries Layer-2 segments over an IP underlay; EVPN is the BGP-based control plane that distributes the reachability for them. Together they build modern data-center fabrics.
In REAP Supported platforms are confirmed per pilot; fabric specifics such as overlay and underlay evidence are reviewed in scoping, as the industries page says for data centers.
Term page →A device or service that enforces security policy between network zones: which addresses, ports and applications may talk, and which may not.
In REAP Firewall pairs are frequent subjects of resilience findings and change verdicts; the firewall failover guide on this site walks through the test, and platform coverage is stated per vendor and version.
Term page →Moving a device to a new operating-system release, usually in a maintenance window, one unit of a redundant pair at a time.
In REAP A frequent Change Assurance case: the illustrative core-pair upgrade on this site completed, kept reachability and still introduced one regression that only before-and-after comparison caught.
Term page →Summaries of the conversations a device forwards: source, destination, ports, protocol, bytes, packets and time, exported as NetFlow or IPFIX.
In REAP Collected where you configure exporters to the connector; used to show which flows crossed a path before and after a change, and to size a backup path from real traffic.
Term page →Protocols that let two routers share one gateway address: one is active, the other stands by and takes over the address if the active one fails (HSRP is Cisco (opens in a new tab)’s; VRRP is the standard).
In REAP Active and standby roles, planned flips during an upgrade and any moment both units sat in standby are evidence in a change verdict; a pair that never flips cleanly is a resilience finding.
Term page →An estate in which on-premises networks and one or more public clouds carry production traffic together, with paths that cross the boundary between them.
In REAP One vendor plus AWS (opens in a new tab) or Azure (opens in a new tab) hybrid cloud is one of the three qualifying statements on the home page: the cross-boundary incident is where single-vendor tools stop.
Term page →The per-interface statistics a device keeps: packets and bytes in and out, errors, discards, CRC errors, utilization over time.
In REAP Evidence for both incidents (errors and discards on a link) and resilience findings (business-hours p95 load on a primary compared with the capacity of its backup).
Term page →IT service management: the practice and the system of record (ServiceNow (opens in a new tab), Jira Service Management (opens in a new tab), ManageEngine) in which incidents, problems, changes and requests are opened, worked and closed.
In REAP REAP reads incidents, problems and changes from your ITSM and writes the Investigation Window, change verdicts and evidence links back as work notes; the ticket you already use stays the system of record.
Source: ITIL (Axelos)
Term page →The open-source platform that runs containerized software across a cluster of machines, restarting and scaling components as needed.
In REAP REAP’s platform is Kubernetes-based, which is how it is deployed into a customer’s cloud account or data center as well as run in REAP Cloud; the supported platforms for a customer-hosted deployment are confirmed at scoping.
Term page →A data-center network design in which every leaf switch connects to every spine switch, so any two servers are the same number of hops apart and capacity grows by adding spines.
In REAP The fabric designs REAP reasons about for data centers and neocloud providers; redundancy in a fabric is assumed rather than proved until something tests it.
Term page →Protocols by which a device announces itself to its directly connected neighbors (LLDP is the standard; CDP is Cisco (opens in a new tab)’s), so each side knows what is on the other end of a link.
In REAP The source of the physical topology REAP discovers and of the “what is actually wired” facts behind its planning and impact analysis.
Term page →A step-by-step plan for a network change: the intent, the exact commands, the checks before and after, the rollback trigger and the rollback steps.
In REAP The MOP template guide on this site provides one; REAP’s pre-execution impact analysis reads the intent and the devices in a MOP to say what the change would touch.
Term page →Two switches presenting themselves as one logical switch to a downstream device, so a server or switch can be connected to both with one bundled link and survive the loss of either.
In REAP Peer-link state, consistency parameters and orphan ports are part of the resilience checks on redundant pairs.
Term page →A network management system: the monitoring platform (SolarWinds (opens in a new tab), Zabbix (opens in a new tab), a vendor’s own) that polls devices, keeps metrics and raises alarms.
In REAP REAP does not replace monitoring and does not modify it. It collects its own telemetry today; incidents your monitoring raises reach REAP through ServiceNow (opens in a new tab) or Jira (opens in a new tab), and reading third-party alert streams is Planned.
Term page →The largest packet an interface will carry. A mismatch between two ends drops large packets or keeps a routing adjacency from forming.
In REAP One of the first checks in REAP’s OSPF troubleshooting moment on the home page: hello and dead timers, MTU and area settings on both ends.
Term page →Rewriting the addresses in packets as they cross a boundary, so private addresses can reach the internet or two networks with overlapping addresses can talk.
In REAP NAT rules are part of the security policy REAP evaluates before a change and part of the path evidence when a flow stops working after one.
Term page →The software a switch, router or firewall runs: Cisco IOS-XE (opens in a new tab) and NX-OS (opens in a new tab), Arista EOS (opens in a new tab), Junos (opens in a new tab), PAN-OS, FortiOS, SONiC (opens in a new tab) and others. Each has its own commands, configuration syntax and failure modes.
In REAP REAP’s agents know each supported platform’s commands and output; coverage is stated per platform and version and confirmed per pilot for anything outside the supported list.
Term page →The team and the room, physical or virtual, that watches the network, takes the first call on an incident and escalates what it cannot resolve.
In REAP A pilot measures tier-1 resolution and escalation rate for the NOC; mid-sized companies without a 24x7 NOC are one of the three segments REAP is built for.
Term page →The protocol that keeps device clocks synchronized. Without it, logs from different devices cannot be placed on one timeline.
In REAP Accurate timestamps are what let REAP relate a change at 21:14 to a symptom at 21:16; NTP state is checked where evidence timelines disagree.
Term page →A named set of addresses, networks or services that firewall and router rules refer to by name, so one group can be reused by many rules.
In REAP Editing a group changes every rule that references it, which is why REAP’s change impact analysis follows references before a change runs and why the illustrative P1 broke a path nobody touched directly.
Term page →The rotation of engineers who can be paged outside business hours, and the tooling (PagerDuty (opens in a new tab), Opsgenie (opens in a new tab)) that pages them.
In REAP On-call integrations are Planned; today the engineer who is paged opens the ticket and finds the Investigation Window waiting in it.
Term page →The networks and systems that run physical processes: plant floors, building systems, medical devices, utilities. Usually segmented from the IT network and governed by stricter change rules.
In REAP OT networks stay out of scope in manufacturing pilots; REAP reasons about the IT boundary that OT depends on (the plant core, the WAN pair, the firewall between zones).
Term page →A link-state routing protocol used inside an organization’s network: routers exchange link information, form neighbor adjacencies and compute the shortest path to every destination.
In REAP OSPF neighbor state (FULL, DOWN, EXSTART and the rest) is standard evidence in an investigation: a neighbor that never changed state rules out the link, as in the Investigation Window on the home page.
Term page →An outage is a service that is down; a degradation is a service that still works but worse than its baseline, slower, lossy or without its redundancy.
In REAP Change verdicts use both words: a change can complete, keep reachability and still leave the network degraded, as in the illustrative upgrade whose DHCP relay would fail on the next failover.
Term page →Following a flow hop by hop through the network, using routing tables, ACLs and NAT, to see which devices and links it actually crosses.
In REAP Used in pre-execution impact analysis and in resilience findings (which paths share a WAN pair, which failover path would carry the load).
Term page →Several physical links between two devices bundled into one logical link for bandwidth and redundancy; LACP is the protocol that negotiates the bundle.
In REAP One of the planning moments on the home page: REAP proposes the bundle from the interfaces that CDP or LLDP shows are actually wired between the two devices.
Term page →The written review after an incident: timeline, cause, contributing factors, what detected it, what fixed it and what will prevent it, without blame.
In REAP The postmortem template guide gives the structure; REAP’s Investigation Window supplies the timeline and the evidence so the review starts from facts rather than memory.
Term page →The state captured before a change (routing neighbors, redundancy state, probes, counters) and the same capture afterwards, compared to decide whether the change did only what it was meant to do.
In REAP What REAP automates for the changes it verifies: a pre-change baseline, a post-change comparison and a delayed post-check at T+30 minutes, with the result written to the change record.
Term page →The ITSM’s ranking of an incident by impact and urgency: P1 is a critical, business-stopping incident, P2 a major one, P3 and P4 lesser ones with longer targets.
In REAP REAP’s loss framing counts the P2s as well as the P1s: the incidents that never reach the board deck add up over a year. See P1 for the figure most teams know by heart.
Source: ITIL (Axelos)
Term page →Policy that classifies traffic and gives some classes priority or guaranteed bandwidth when a link is congested.
In REAP The illustrative resilience finding on this site: a backup circuit with no QoS class for plant telemetry would congest on failover and drop production traffic with everything else.
Term page →A synthetic test (ping, traceroute or an application-level check) run on a schedule from a known point to confirm that a path still works.
In REAP Probes from the connector before and after a change are compared against the baseline in a change verdict, with a delayed post-check at T+30 minutes; the illustrative P1 had no probe on the ERP path, which is why it went undetected for hours.
Term page →Recovery point objective: how much data may be lost in a failure. Recovery time objective: how long recovery may take. Both are commitments, not measurements.
In REAP REAP Cloud’s availability commitment and recovery objectives are stated in the subscription agreement; for customer-hosted deployments, backup and restore procedures are documented for your operations team.
Term page →running-startup-configurationThe running configuration is what a device is doing now; the startup configuration is what it will do after a reload. When they differ, a reboot changes the network.
In REAP Running/startup drift is one of the posture findings available today; it is also how a change that was never saved comes back after the next maintenance reload.
Term page →Software-defined wide-area networking: branch and site connectivity run as policy over several circuits (internet, MPLS, cellular) and managed from a controller rather than device by device.
In REAP SD-WAN policy and firmware waves are a Change Assurance case for retail and branch estates; coverage of a given SD-WAN platform is confirmed per pilot.
Term page →A vendor’s published notice that a vulnerability affects certain releases and features, with the fixed releases and workarounds; vendors publish them through a product security incident response team (PSIRT).
In REAP Contextual CVE (opens in a new tab) exposure: REAP ranks an advisory by whether the vulnerable feature is actually configured and reachable on the device, not by version match alone.
Term page →Simple Network Management Protocol: a device exposes counters and state as a tree of values that a monitoring system polls, and sends traps when something changes.
In REAP The connector polls metrics over SNMP (a read community or an SNMPv3 user) and receives traps; both are telemetry REAP collects itself today.
Term page →A Layer-2 protocol that blocks redundant switch links so frames cannot loop, and unblocks them when the active path fails.
In REAP Root bridge, blocked ports and topology-change counters are evidence in campus and data-center incidents where a loop or a convergence event is suspected.
Term page →Secure Shell: the encrypted protocol used to reach a device’s command line and to transfer files to it.
In REAP The connector cluster reaches devices over SSH with read-only credentials brokered from your PAM where available; the connector’s own traffic to the platform leaves over one outbound TLS tunnel.
Term page →A written, repeatable procedure for routine operational work, kept so that different people do the same task the same way.
In REAP SOPs and runbooks are among the information islands REAP reads; approved ones become natural-language runbooks that tier 1 can run under governance.
Term page →Devices pushing state and counters to a collector continuously (over gNMI (opens in a new tab), for example) instead of waiting to be polled.
In REAP gNMI (opens in a new tab) dial-out subscriptions to the connector are one of the three telemetry sources a pilot connects on day 2, alongside syslog and SNMP.
Term page →The standard way devices send event messages (a link went down, a neighbor changed state, a configuration was saved) to a collector, each with a timestamp and a severity.
In REAP Point device syslog at the connector VIP: syslog lines are first-class evidence, and the absence of a link event in syslog is itself evidence, as in the illustrative P1.
Term page →A support case opened with a network vendor’s technical assistance center, usually after the in-house team has exhausted its own evidence.
In REAP TAC history is one of the information islands REAP reads; an investigation that already holds the evidence a TAC engineer would ask for shortens the case or avoids it.
Term page →A logical segment of a switched network that keeps a group of ports or devices in their own broadcast domain, identified by a number (VLAN 220, VLAN 3998).
In REAP VLAN membership, trunks and the VLAN interfaces that carry gateways and DHCP relay appear in configuration diffs and in the blast radius of a change.
Term page →A virtual private network: an encrypted tunnel that carries private traffic across a public network, between sites or from a user to the network.
In REAP Firewall and VPN standby pairs are among the first resilience checks in campus pilots; cloud VPN gateways are read as cloud network constructs.
Term page →The virtual terminal lines through which remote sessions (SSH, Telnet) reach a device; access lists on them decide who may connect.
In REAP Named in the network requirements as one of the things to confirm when enrolling devices: the connector’s address must be permitted on the VTY access list.
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