Core concepts

The terms here are the product's own, worded the way they appear on screen. Industry terms — CVE, CVSS, EOL, BIA, maintenance window — are explained in the glossary and are not repeated here.

Event and window

A window is the span of time. An event is the record that manages it: the update type, what it covers, who is responsible, who was notified, and what happened in the end. Everything the system sends and records hangs off the event, not off the window.

An event has five states:

State	What it means
Planned	Scheduled and sent, not yet started
In progress	The window is open right now
Completed	Done
Failed	The window took place and did not achieve what it was for
Cancelled	Will not take place; a cancellation went to everyone who was invited

The first four are set from the event panel. Cancelling is not one of them — it is a separate action, because it is what sends the cancellation into the calendars that already accepted the invitation. Older events may also show the value Approved; it is kept for display and is not set from the screen.

Hence the order: permanent deletion is only possible after cancellation. Hard-deleting a live event would leave the meeting sitting in every calendar that already received it, with no way to remove it.

Update type

The update type is the first decision in the wizard, and it settles three things at once:

• What you pick from — servers, equipment or databases. Three different selections, one step in the wizard.
• Whether a selection is required at all — some update types have no targets, and for those the step disappears.
• What goes out — each update type has one template serving the email, the calendar invitation and the ticket. One template, three destinations, so the wording cannot diverge between them.

Tier and cadence

The Tier column holds the server's exposure, and that is what decides how often it is updated:

Tier	Default cadence
B2B · Tier 1 · Tier 2	Every 3 months
Tier 3 · MGMT	Every 6 months

Both numbers are editable by an administrator and apply across the estate. The Frequency and Next update columns are both derived from the same value, so they cannot contradict each other.

Collision

Two windows overlapping in time, on systems that depend on each other. The combination is the defect — each window on its own is fine, both have owners, and both are within cadence.

The connections themselves are not declared by hand; they are observed from actual traffic, so the list reflects what really talks to what. The same check runs in three places — the wizard, the collisions screen and the alerts — from one implementation, so the answer cannot change depending on which screen asked.

Business impact

A system's criticality rating. It is not just a label: it is one of the five factors behind the urgency score on the recommendations screen, alongside how far behind the system actually is, how much of it faces outward, its open vulnerabilities and its size. The score is shown broken into its terms, and the points sum to exactly the score.

Patch and vulnerability

A vulnerability is a CVE. A patch is what closes it. A row in the register is one vulnerability, but the unit that actually gets scheduled is the patch — one patch closes several vulnerabilities across several hosts, and it is the patch that goes into a window. That is why the register is read in two modes over the same data: by vulnerability, and by patch.

The vocabulary of the tables

Every table in the system works the same way, and four terms recur across all of them.

Saved view — a named combination of filters and sorting. It is shared by every user; an administrator creates it, anyone applies it. Applying one replaces the table's state: a filter the view does not mention is cleared, rather than left over from the previous piece of work.

Filters — the panel behind the Filters button, listing each column's values with a count beside each one. Counts are computed with that column's own filter left out; otherwise ticking one value would zero every other count on the panel. A value you have ticked stays visible even at a count of zero — otherwise there would be no way to untick it.

Custom field — a field the organization adds to a record itself, beyond what arrives from the inventory sources. Marking a field as required applies to the next save only; it does not apply itself retroactively to records that already exist.

Density — how many rows fit on screen. Three settings, each user's own decision, per table, stored on the device.