---
title: "Monitoring &amp; Reliability Glossary | FourSight"
description: "Plain-English definitions of uptime, SLA, TLS, DNS, webhook, and incident-response terms — each cited from IETF, NIST, Google SRE, Stripe, AWS, and other primary sources."
lang: en
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    "description": "Plain-English definitions of monitoring, reliability, security, and SaaS billing terms, each cited from primary authoritative sources.",
    "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
    "hasDefinedTerm": [
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/uptime",
        "name": "Uptime",
        "description": "The percentage of time a service is reachable and responding correctly over a given window. Usually expressed as a number of nines — 99.9% (\"three nines\") allows about 43 minutes of downtime per month.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/uptime",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/downtime",
        "name": "Downtime",
        "description": "Any period during which a service fails to respond, returns errors, or is so degraded it is unusable. Industry practice typically counts hard failures (5xx, timeouts, connection refused) and responses above a defined latency threshold.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/downtime",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/sla",
        "name": "SLA (Service Level Agreement)",
        "description": "A formal contract between a service provider and a customer that defines minimum service levels and the consequences (usually credits) if those levels are not met.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/sla",
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      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/slo",
        "name": "SLO (Service Level Objective)",
        "description": "An internal reliability target — for example, \"99.9% of API requests succeed within 500 ms over a rolling 30-day window.\" SLOs are stricter than SLAs and used to drive engineering decisions.",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/sli",
        "name": "SLI (Service Level Indicator)",
        "description": "The raw measurement that an SLO is calculated from — request success ratio, latency percentile, or freshness of a data pipeline.",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/mttr",
        "name": "MTTR (Mean Time To Resolve / Recover)",
        "description": "Average time between an incident being detected and the service being fully restored. Lower MTTR is a primary goal of incident response.",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/mttd",
        "name": "MTTD (Mean Time To Detect)",
        "description": "Average time between the start of an incident and the moment your team is first alerted. Fast MTTD depends on dense monitoring and high-signal alerting.",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/mtbf",
        "name": "MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)",
        "description": "Average time a system runs successfully between failures. Higher MTBF indicates a more reliable system.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/mtbf",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "mtbf",
        "sameAs": [
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      },
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/availability-vs-reliability",
        "name": "Availability vs Reliability",
        "description": "Availability measures whether a service responds (uptime %). Reliability measures whether it responds correctly and within acceptable latency. A service can be available but unreliable if responses are slow or wrong.",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/latency",
        "name": "Latency",
        "description": "The time between sending a request and receiving the first byte of a response, usually measured in milliseconds.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/latency",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/percentile-latency",
        "name": "P50 / P95 / P99 Latency",
        "description": "Percentile measurements of response time. P95 = 95% of requests complete in this time or faster. P99 captures the slow tail that average latency hides — often where the worst user experiences live.",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/quorum-monitoring",
        "name": "Quorum-based Monitoring",
        "description": "A monitoring technique where a failure is only declared when a majority of independent probes (e.g. 3 of 4 global regions) agree the target is down. Filters out single-region network blips.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/quorum-monitoring",
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        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/multi-region-monitoring",
        "name": "Multi-Region Monitoring",
        "description": "Checking an endpoint from probes located in different geographic regions and networks. Catches regional outages, CDN routing issues, and ISP-specific failures that single-region monitors miss.",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/probe",
        "name": "Probe / Probe Node",
        "description": "A server, hosted in a specific region, that issues monitoring checks against your endpoints on a schedule and reports the results.",
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        "termCode": "probe",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/synthetic-monitoring",
        "name": "Synthetic Monitoring",
        "description": "Active monitoring that simulates user interactions (HTTP requests, browser flows) at a regular interval — as opposed to passive monitoring which observes real user traffic.",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/heartbeat-monitor",
        "name": "Heartbeat Monitor",
        "description": "A monitor that expects your job, script, or worker to ping it on a schedule. If the expected ping doesn't arrive within a grace period, the monitor alerts — catching silent failures.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/heartbeat-monitor",
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        "termCode": "heartbeat-monitor",
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      },
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/keyword-monitor",
        "name": "Keyword Monitor",
        "description": "An HTTP monitor that not only checks status code but also asserts that the response body contains (or does not contain) a specific string. Catches \"200 OK with wrong content\" failures.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/keyword-monitor",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "keyword-monitor",
        "sameAs": [
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      },
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/http-monitor",
        "name": "HTTP Monitor",
        "description": "Sends an HTTP/HTTPS request to a URL and evaluates the response against expected status codes, body content, headers, and latency.",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/ping-monitor",
        "name": "Ping Monitor",
        "description": "Sends ICMP echo requests to a host to confirm it is reachable on the network. Cheap and broadly compatible, but blocked by many cloud providers and firewalls.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/ping-monitor",
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        "termCode": "ping-monitor",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/port-monitor",
        "name": "Port Monitor",
        "description": "Attempts to open a TCP connection on a specific port (e.g. 25 for SMTP, 5432 for Postgres) to confirm the service is accepting connections.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/port-monitor",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "port-monitor",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/false-positive",
        "name": "False Positive",
        "description": "An alert that fires for a problem that did not actually affect users — usually caused by network blips, probe-side issues, or overly sensitive thresholds. Frequent false positives cause alert fatigue.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/false-positive",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/grace-period",
        "name": "Grace Period",
        "description": "A buffer window after a missed check or heartbeat before the monitor alerts. Prevents flapping alerts from jobs that occasionally run a few minutes late.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/grace-period",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "grace-period",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/check-interval",
        "name": "Check Interval",
        "description": "How often a monitor runs — e.g. every 30 seconds, 1 minute, or 5 minutes. Shorter intervals detect outages faster but increase load and cost.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/check-interval",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "check-interval",
        "sameAs": [
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      },
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/consecutive-failure-threshold",
        "name": "Consecutive Failure Threshold",
        "description": "The number of failed checks in a row required before an incident is opened. Higher thresholds reduce noise but slow detection.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/consecutive-failure-threshold",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
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      },
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/incident",
        "name": "Incident",
        "description": "An unplanned event that disrupts service or threatens to. Incidents have severity, an owner, a timeline, and end with a resolution and (for serious ones) a post-mortem.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/incident",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "incident",
        "sameAs": [
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      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/severity",
        "name": "Severity (SEV-1 to SEV-4)",
        "description": "A standardized scale for how serious an incident is. SEV-1 is a full outage; SEV-4 is cosmetic. Severity drives response time, who's paged, and whether status-page comms are required.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/severity",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "severity",
        "sameAs": [
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/incident-commander",
        "name": "Incident Commander (IC)",
        "description": "The single person who owns coordination of an incident end-to-end. The IC doesn't write the fix — they decide severity, assign roles, drive comms, and call the all-clear.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/incident-commander",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/tech-lead",
        "name": "Tech Lead (during incident)",
        "description": "The engineer actively diagnosing and fixing the problem during an incident. Reports findings up to the Incident Commander.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/tech-lead",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/comms-lead",
        "name": "Comms Lead",
        "description": "Owns customer-facing communication during an incident — status page updates, in-product banners, support team briefings. Frees engineers to focus on the technical fix.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/comms-lead",
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        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/on-call-rotation",
        "name": "On-Call Rotation",
        "description": "A scheduled rotation of engineers who are responsible for responding to alerts outside business hours. Sustainable rotations are weekly and shared across at least 4–5 people.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/on-call-rotation",
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        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/escalation-policy",
        "name": "Escalation Policy",
        "description": "Rules that decide who gets paged next if the primary on-call doesn't acknowledge within a timeout. Typically: primary → secondary → engineering manager.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/escalation-policy",
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        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/alert-fatigue",
        "name": "Alert Fatigue",
        "description": "Desensitization caused by too many low-quality alerts. Leads to slower response times, missed real incidents, and on-call burnout.",
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        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/runbook",
        "name": "Runbook",
        "description": "A concise, action-oriented document telling an on-call engineer exactly what to do when a specific alert fires — diagnostic queries, remediation commands, escalation contacts.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/runbook",
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        "name": "Playbook",
        "description": "A broader process document covering how a team responds to incidents in general — severity rubric, roles, comms templates, post-mortem requirements. Distinct from a runbook, which is alert-specific.",
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        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/post-mortem",
        "name": "Post-Mortem",
        "description": "A written analysis published after an incident covering what happened, when, why, and what will change. Best practice is to publish public post-mortems within 5 business days of serious incidents.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/post-mortem",
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        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/blameless-post-mortem",
        "name": "Blameless Post-Mortem",
        "description": "A post-mortem written in terms of \"the system allowed X\" rather than \"person Y did X.\" Removing blame is what makes engineers honest about what really happened, which is the whole point.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/blameless-post-mortem",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/root-cause",
        "name": "Root Cause",
        "description": "The underlying systemic reason an incident occurred — not just the trigger. Mature post-mortems usually identify multiple contributing causes rather than a single \"root.\"",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/root-cause",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/five-whys",
        "name": "Five Whys",
        "description": "A root-cause analysis technique where you ask \"why?\" five times in sequence, each answer pointing one level deeper, to reach a systemic cause rather than a symptom.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/five-whys",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/blast-radius",
        "name": "Blast Radius",
        "description": "The scope of users, systems, or data affected by an incident. \"Limit the blast radius\" means contain the failure to as small a group as possible.",
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/mitigation",
        "name": "Mitigation vs Resolution",
        "description": "Mitigation stops the bleeding (rollback, failover, scale up). Resolution is the permanent fix. During an incident, mitigate first — resolution can wait until the customers are unaffected.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/mitigation",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "mitigation",
        "sameAs": [
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        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/status-page",
        "name": "Status Page",
        "description": "A public web page showing the current operational state of your services and a history of incidents. Reduces inbound support volume during outages and signals operational maturity to prospects.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/status-page",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "status-page",
        "sameAs": [
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      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/status-component",
        "name": "Status Component",
        "description": "A logical group on a status page (e.g. \"API\", \"Dashboard\", \"Webhooks\") representing one customer-facing service. Components have their own status indicator that aggregates underlying monitors.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/status-component",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "status-component",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://support.atlassian.com/statuspage/docs/show-service-status-with-components/"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/maintenance-window",
        "name": "Maintenance Window",
        "description": "A pre-announced period when a service may be unavailable for planned work. Industry norms: 48–72 hours' notice for scheduled maintenance, with start/end time and affected components.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/maintenance-window",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "maintenance-window",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://support.atlassian.com/statuspage/docs/schedule-maintenance/"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/http-status-codes",
        "name": "HTTP Status Codes (2xx / 4xx / 5xx)",
        "description": "Three-digit response codes returned by HTTP servers. 2xx = success, 3xx = redirect, 4xx = client error (bad request), 5xx = server error. Monitoring tools alert on 4xx/5xx codes.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/http-status-codes",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "http-status-codes",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9110#name-status-codes",
          "https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/timeout",
        "name": "Timeout",
        "description": "The maximum time a client waits for a response before giving up. Common timeout layers: DNS, TCP connect, TLS handshake, HTTP request, and application-level.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/timeout",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "timeout",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Connection_management_in_HTTP_1.x"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/dns",
        "name": "DNS (Domain Name System)",
        "description": "The internet's address book — translates human-readable domain names like foursight.cloud into IP addresses that computers route traffic to.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/dns",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "dns",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/a-record",
        "name": "A Record",
        "description": "A DNS record that maps a hostname to an IPv4 address (e.g. `foursight.cloud → 76.76.21.21`).",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/a-record",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "a-record",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035#section-3.4.1"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/aaaa-record",
        "name": "AAAA Record",
        "description": "Maps a hostname to an IPv6 address. Functionally the IPv6 equivalent of an A record.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/aaaa-record",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "aaaa-record",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3596"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/cname-record",
        "name": "CNAME Record",
        "description": "An alias DNS record that points one hostname to another (e.g. `www.example.com → example.com`). Commonly used for CDN and SaaS service integrations.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/cname-record",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "cname-record",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035#section-3.3.1"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/mx-record",
        "name": "MX Record",
        "description": "Identifies the mail servers responsible for accepting email for a domain.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/mx-record",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "mx-record",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5321"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/txt-record",
        "name": "TXT Record",
        "description": "A free-form DNS record that holds arbitrary text. Used by SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and domain-verification challenges from third-party services.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/txt-record",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "txt-record",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1464"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/spf",
        "name": "SPF (Sender Policy Framework)",
        "description": "A DNS-based email-authentication standard that tells receiving mail servers which IPs are permitted to send mail for your domain. Missing or broken SPF causes legitimate email to land in spam.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/spf",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "spf",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7208"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/dkim",
        "name": "DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)",
        "description": "An email-authentication standard where outbound mail is cryptographically signed, and the receiving server verifies the signature against a public key stored in DNS.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/dkim",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "dkim",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6376"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/ttl",
        "name": "TTL (Time To Live)",
        "description": "How long, in seconds, a DNS resolver may cache a record before re-querying. Low TTL = fast propagation but higher query volume; high TTL = the opposite.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/ttl",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "ttl",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035#section-3.2.1"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/dns-propagation",
        "name": "DNS Propagation",
        "description": "The time it takes for a DNS change to be visible to users worldwide. Capped by the previous record's TTL — typical full propagation takes a few minutes to a few hours.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/dns-propagation",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "dns-propagation",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/dns-hijacking",
        "name": "DNS Hijacking",
        "description": "An attack where DNS queries are redirected to malicious servers, sending traffic intended for your domain to an attacker.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/dns-hijacking",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "dns-hijacking",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/directives/ed-19-01-mitigate-dns-infrastructure-tampering"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/dnssec",
        "name": "DNSSEC",
        "description": "DNS Security Extensions — cryptographic signatures on DNS records that let resolvers verify responses haven't been tampered with. Expired DNSSEC signatures cause complete resolution failure for validating resolvers.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/dnssec",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "dnssec",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4033"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/cdn",
        "name": "CDN (Content Delivery Network)",
        "description": "A globally distributed network of cache servers that serve content from the location closest to each user, reducing latency and origin load.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/cdn",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "cdn",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/CDN"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/edge-pop",
        "name": "Edge / Edge POP",
        "description": "A CDN's \"point of presence\" — a physical location near end users that caches and serves content. \"Edge functions\" run small bits of compute at these locations.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/edge-pop",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "edge-pop",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/cdn/glossary/edge-server/"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/isr",
        "name": "ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration)",
        "description": "A Next.js feature that lets statically generated pages refresh in the background on a schedule or on-demand, without rebuilding the whole site.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/isr",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "isr",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://vercel.com/docs/incremental-static-regeneration"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/cold-start",
        "name": "Cold Start",
        "description": "The latency penalty incurred the first time a serverless function runs after a period of inactivity, while the runtime is being initialized. Can range from tens of milliseconds to several seconds.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/cold-start",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "cold-start",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/operatorguide/execution-environments.html"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/throttling",
        "name": "Throttling",
        "description": "Deliberately slowing or rejecting requests once a defined rate has been exceeded, to protect a service from overload.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/throttling",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "throttling",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/api-gateway-request-throttling.html"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/rate-limit",
        "name": "Rate Limit",
        "description": "A cap on how many requests a client may make to an API in a given time window. Exceeding the limit typically returns HTTP 429 Too Many Requests.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/rate-limit",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "rate-limit",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6585#section-4"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/ssl-tls",
        "name": "SSL / TLS",
        "description": "Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the cryptographic protocol that powers HTTPS. \"SSL\" is the deprecated predecessor — when people say \"SSL\" today they almost always mean TLS.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/ssl-tls",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "ssl-tls",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8446"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/tls-13",
        "name": "TLS 1.2 vs TLS 1.3",
        "description": "TLS 1.3 (2018) is faster (one round-trip handshake) and more secure (removed legacy ciphers) than TLS 1.2. TLS 1.0 and 1.1 are deprecated and should not be supported.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/tls-13",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "tls-13",
        "sameAs": [
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          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8996"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/certificate",
        "name": "TLS Certificate (Leaf, Intermediate, Root CA)",
        "description": "An X.509 certificate is a signed document binding a public key to a domain. The leaf is your server's cert; intermediates are signed by a trusted root Certificate Authority (CA) that browsers already trust.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/certificate",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "certificate",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5280"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/certificate-chain",
        "name": "Certificate Chain",
        "description": "The sequence of certificates linking your server's leaf cert back to a trusted root CA. An incomplete chain is the most common SSL gotcha — works in Chrome (which caches intermediates) but fails on iOS Safari, Android, and many HTTP clients.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/certificate-chain",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "certificate-chain",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5280#section-6"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/wildcard-certificate",
        "name": "Wildcard Certificate",
        "description": "A TLS cert valid for one subdomain level — `*.example.com` covers `api.example.com` but NOT `v2.api.example.com`.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/wildcard-certificate",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "wildcard-certificate",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6125#section-6.4.3"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/lets-encrypt",
        "name": "Let's Encrypt",
        "description": "A free, automated, non-profit Certificate Authority issuing 90-day TLS certificates. Industry standard for auto-renewed certs on most modern web infrastructure.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/lets-encrypt",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "lets-encrypt",
        "sameAs": [
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          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8555"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/hsts",
        "name": "HSTS (HTTP Strict Transport Security)",
        "description": "An HTTP response header that tells browsers to only ever connect to your site over HTTPS — protects against SSL-stripping attacks. Best practice: `max-age=31536000; includeSubDomains; preload`.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/hsts",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "hsts",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6797"
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      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/ocsp-stapling",
        "name": "OCSP Stapling",
        "description": "An optimization where your server periodically fetches a signed certificate-validity statement from the CA and \"staples\" it to the TLS handshake — avoiding a separate revocation check from the user's browser.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/ocsp-stapling",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "ocsp-stapling",
        "sameAs": [
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      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/cipher-suite",
        "name": "Cipher Suite",
        "description": "The bundle of cryptographic algorithms a TLS connection uses (key exchange + bulk cipher + MAC). Modern best-practice suites use AEAD ciphers like AES-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 with ECDHE key exchange.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/cipher-suite",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "cipher-suite",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://ssl-config.mozilla.org/"
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      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/aead",
        "name": "AEAD (Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data)",
        "description": "A class of ciphers that encrypt data and authenticate it in a single operation. AES-GCM and ChaCha20-Poly1305 are the standard AEAD ciphers in TLS 1.2 and the only ones allowed in TLS 1.3.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/aead",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "aead",
        "sameAs": [
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      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/ecdhe",
        "name": "ECDHE (Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman Ephemeral)",
        "description": "A key-exchange algorithm that gives every TLS session a fresh, ephemeral key — providing forward secrecy so past traffic stays safe even if a server's long-term key is later compromised.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/ecdhe",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "ecdhe",
        "sameAs": [
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      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/cert-pinning",
        "name": "Certificate Pinning",
        "description": "A mobile-app technique where the client only accepts a specific server certificate (or its issuing CA), even if other certs would otherwise be trusted. Stops MITM attacks but breaks completely if you rotate certs without updating the app.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/cert-pinning",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "cert-pinning",
        "sameAs": [
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      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/signature-verification",
        "name": "Signature Verification",
        "description": "The process of checking that a message hasn't been tampered with by re-computing a cryptographic signature with a shared secret or public key and comparing. Used in webhook payloads, JWTs, and TLS handshakes.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/signature-verification",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "signature-verification",
        "sameAs": [
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        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/hmac",
        "name": "HMAC (Hash-based Message Authentication Code)",
        "description": "A construction for verifying message integrity and authenticity using a shared secret and a hash function (e.g. HMAC-SHA256). Stripe, GitHub, and most webhook providers sign payloads with HMAC.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/hmac",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "hmac",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2104",
          "https://csrc.nist.gov/publications/detail/fips/198/1/final"
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      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/webhook-secret",
        "name": "Webhook Secret",
        "description": "A shared secret used to sign webhook payloads with HMAC so the receiver can verify they came from the legitimate sender and weren't modified in transit.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/webhook-secret",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "webhook-secret",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://docs.stripe.com/webhooks#verify-events"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/mrr",
        "name": "MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)",
        "description": "The predictable monthly subscription revenue a SaaS earns, normalized so annual plans count as 1/12 per month.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/mrr",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "mrr",
        "sameAs": [
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        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/arr",
        "name": "ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)",
        "description": "Annualised subscription revenue, i.e. MRR × 12. Standard top-line metric for SaaS valuation and growth tracking.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/arr",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "arr",
        "sameAs": [
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        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/acv",
        "name": "ACV (Annual Contract Value)",
        "description": "The yearly value of a single customer contract, normalized to one year. Used to size and segment enterprise sales pipelines.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/acv",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "acv",
        "sameAs": [
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        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/churn",
        "name": "Churn",
        "description": "The rate at which customers cancel or downgrade. Logo churn counts accounts; revenue churn counts dollars; net revenue churn nets out upgrades and expansion.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/churn",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "churn",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://stripe.com/resources/more/revenue-churn-101-how-to-calculate-it-and-why-it-matters"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/webhook",
        "name": "Webhook",
        "description": "An HTTP POST request a service sends to a URL you control when an event happens (e.g. \"payment succeeded\"). The opposite of polling — the service notifies you instead of you asking.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/webhook",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "webhook",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://docs.stripe.com/webhooks"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/idempotency",
        "name": "Idempotency",
        "description": "Property of an operation that produces the same result no matter how many times it runs. Critical for webhook handlers, payment APIs, and any retry-driven system.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/idempotency",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "idempotency",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9110#name-idempotent-methods",
          "https://docs.stripe.com/api/idempotent_requests"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/exponential-backoff",
        "name": "Exponential Backoff",
        "description": "A retry strategy where each subsequent retry waits exponentially longer than the last (e.g. 1s, 2s, 4s, 8s). Usually combined with jitter to prevent thundering-herd retries from overwhelming a recovering service.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/exponential-backoff",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "exponential-backoff",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/exponential-backoff-and-jitter/"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/retry-policy",
        "name": "Retry Policy",
        "description": "The rules governing how a system retries failed operations — maximum attempts, backoff schedule, which error types are retried, and what counts as terminal failure.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/retry-policy",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "retry-policy",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://sre.google/sre-book/handling-overload/"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/service-credit",
        "name": "Service Credit",
        "description": "A refund or account credit issued automatically when an SLA tier is breached. Typical schedule: 10% credit at 99–99.9% monthly uptime, 25% at 95–99%, 50% below 95%.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/service-credit",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "service-credit",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://aws.amazon.com/compute/sla/"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/soc2",
        "name": "SOC 2",
        "description": "An AICPA framework for auditing how a service organisation handles customer data across five Trust Services Criteria: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/soc2",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "soc2",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://www.aicpa-cima.com/resources/download/2017-trust-services-criteria-with-revised-points-of-focus-2022"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/gdpr",
        "name": "GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)",
        "description": "EU regulation governing how personal data of EU residents may be collected, processed, stored, and transferred. Applies to any company serving EU users, regardless of where the company is based.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/gdpr",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "gdpr",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2016/679/oj"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/hipaa",
        "name": "HIPAA",
        "description": "US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act — sets rules for protecting patient health information (PHI). SaaS serving US healthcare must sign Business Associate Agreements with downstream vendors.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/hipaa",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "hipaa",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/index.html"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/fair-use-policy",
        "name": "Fair-Use Policy",
        "description": "A clause in a provider's terms that lets them throttle or suspend accounts whose usage \"unreasonably\" exceeds typical patterns, even on unlimited plans. Especially important to read on free or unlimited monitoring tiers.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/fair-use-policy",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "fair-use-policy",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/advertising-marketing/online-advertising-marketing"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/stripe-webhook",
        "name": "Stripe Webhook",
        "description": "An HTTPS POST that Stripe sends to your endpoint when a billing event occurs. Stripe retries failed deliveries with exponential backoff for up to 3 days, then drops the event permanently.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/stripe-webhook",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "stripe-webhook",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://docs.stripe.com/webhooks"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/stripe-events-api",
        "name": "Stripe Events API",
        "description": "An API that lets you fetch and replay past Stripe events — essential for recovering after a webhook outage exceeded Stripe's 3-day retry window.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/stripe-events-api",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "stripe-events-api",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://docs.stripe.com/api/events"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/supabase-auth",
        "name": "Supabase Auth",
        "description": "Supabase's hosted authentication service — email/password, OAuth, magic links, MFA — built on top of Postgres and exposed via GoTrue.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/supabase-auth",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "supabase-auth",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://supabase.com/docs/guides/auth"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/supabase-realtime",
        "name": "Supabase Realtime",
        "description": "A WebSocket-based service that streams Postgres changes (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE), broadcast messages, and presence state to subscribed clients in real time.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/supabase-realtime",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "supabase-realtime",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://supabase.com/docs/guides/realtime"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/supabase-edge-functions",
        "name": "Supabase Edge Functions",
        "description": "Deno-based serverless functions deployed globally and invoked over HTTPS. Used for custom server logic, webhooks, and integrations with third-party APIs.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/supabase-edge-functions",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "supabase-edge-functions",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://supabase.com/docs/guides/functions"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/postgres-connection-pool",
        "name": "Postgres Connection Pool",
        "description": "A managed set of pre-opened Postgres connections shared across application requests. Without pooling, every request opens a fresh connection and the database quickly saturates.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/postgres-connection-pool",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "postgres-connection-pool",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-connection.html",
          "https://supabase.com/docs/guides/database/connecting-to-postgres"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/aws-lambda",
        "name": "AWS Lambda",
        "description": "Amazon's serverless function-as-a-service product — runs your code in response to events without you managing servers. Has measurable cold-start latency the first time a function runs after idle.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/aws-lambda",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "aws-lambda",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/welcome.html"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/api-gateway",
        "name": "API Gateway",
        "description": "A managed service (most commonly AWS API Gateway) that fronts your backend with routing, rate-limiting, auth, throttling, and request transformation.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/api-gateway",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "api-gateway",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/cloudflare-workers",
        "name": "Cloudflare Workers",
        "description": "Cloudflare's edge serverless runtime — JavaScript or WebAssembly running in V8 isolates across hundreds of edge locations with sub-millisecond cold starts.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/cloudflare-workers",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "cloudflare-workers",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/kv-store",
        "name": "KV Store",
        "description": "A globally distributed key-value store (Cloudflare Workers KV, Vercel KV, etc.). Eventually consistent — writes can take up to ~60 seconds to propagate across all edge locations.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/kv-store",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "kv-store",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://developers.cloudflare.com/kv/"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/blue-green-deploy",
        "name": "Blue-Green Deployment",
        "description": "A zero-downtime release strategy with two identical environments. New version deploys to the idle (\"green\") environment; traffic cuts over instantly once it's verified healthy. Instant rollback by switching back.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/blue-green-deploy",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "blue-green-deploy",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://martinfowler.com/bliki/BlueGreenDeployment.html"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/rolling-deploy",
        "name": "Rolling Deployment",
        "description": "A release strategy that replaces instances of an old version with the new version gradually, a few at a time, keeping the service available throughout.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/rolling-deploy",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "rolling-deploy",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/deployment-types.html"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/failover",
        "name": "Failover",
        "description": "Switching automatically (or manually) from a failed primary system to a healthy standby. Common patterns: DNS failover, database failover replicas, multi-region active-passive.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/failover",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "failover",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/reliability-pillar/welcome.html"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/circuit-breaker",
        "name": "Circuit Breaker",
        "description": "A pattern where a client temporarily stops calling a failing downstream service after a threshold of errors, returns fast failures, and periodically tests if the service has recovered.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/circuit-breaker",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "circuit-breaker",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CircuitBreaker.html"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/queue-saturation",
        "name": "Queue Saturation",
        "description": "A failure mode where work arrives at a queue faster than it's processed, the queue grows unbounded, and latency cascades. Often happens during traffic spikes or after a worker outage.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/queue-saturation",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "queue-saturation",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://sre.google/sre-book/handling-overload/"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/etl-pipeline",
        "name": "ETL Pipeline",
        "description": "\"Extract, Transform, Load\" — a scheduled data pipeline that pulls data from a source, transforms it, and writes it to a destination (data warehouse, analytics DB). Silent ETL failures often go undetected for days without heartbeat monitoring.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/etl-pipeline",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "etl-pipeline",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/etl/"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/cron-job",
        "name": "Cron Job",
        "description": "A scheduled task that runs at fixed times or intervals, defined by a `crontab` expression. Originally a Unix utility; the name is now used for any scheduled background job.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/cron-job",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "cron-job",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/crontab.html"
        ]
      },
      {
        "@type": "DefinedTerm",
        "@id": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/tabletop-exercise",
        "name": "Tabletop Exercise",
        "description": "A simulated incident walked through verbally by the team — no actual production impact — to test the playbook, rehearse roles, and uncover gaps before a real incident.",
        "url": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary/tabletop-exercise",
        "inDefinedTermSet": "https://foursight.cloud/glossary",
        "termCode": "tabletop-exercise",
        "sameAs": [
          "https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/services/cisa-tabletop-exercise-packages"
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
---

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# Monitoring & Reliability Glossary

Plain-English definitions for the technical terms used across our guides — each cited from primary, authoritative sources (IETF, NIST, Google SRE, MDN, Stripe, AWS).

AllMonitoring & UptimeIncidents & On-CallWeb & NetworkingSecurity & TLSSaaS & BillingPlatformsOperations

ABCDEFGHIJ KLMN OPQRSTUV WX Y Z 

## A

9 terms · 109 total 

### [A Record](/glossary/a-record)

Web & Networking

A DNS record that maps a hostname to an IPv4 address (e.g. \`foursight.cloud → 76.76.21.21\`).

Primary source

-   IETF —  [RFC 1035 §3.4.1 — A RDATA format](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1035#section-3.4.1)

### [AAAA Record](/glossary/aaaa-record)

Web & Networking

Maps a hostname to an IPv6 address. Functionally the IPv6 equivalent of an A record.

Primary source

-   IETF —  [RFC 3596 — DNS Extensions to Support IP Version 6](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3596)

### [ACV (Annual Contract Value)](/glossary/acv)

SaaS & Billing

The yearly value of a single customer contract, normalized to one year. Used to size and segment enterprise sales pipelines.

Primary source

-   HubSpot —  [ACV explained](https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/annual-contract-value-acv)

### [AEAD (Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data)](/glossary/aead)

Security & TLS

A class of ciphers that encrypt data and authenticate it in a single operation. AES-GCM and ChaCha20-Poly1305 are the standard AEAD ciphers in TLS 1.2 and the only ones allowed in TLS 1.3.

Primary source

-   IETF —  [RFC 5116 — AEAD Interface](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5116)

### [Alert Fatigue](/glossary/alert-fatigue)

Incidents & On-Call

Desensitization caused by too many low-quality alerts. Leads to slower response times, missed real incidents, and on-call burnout.

Primary source

-   Google SRE Workbook —  [Alerting on SLOs](https://sre.google/workbook/alerting-on-slos/)

[Related guide: Alerting Without Alert Fatigue](/guides/alerting-without-alert-fatigue)

### [API Gateway](/glossary/api-gateway)

Platforms

A managed service (most commonly AWS API Gateway) that fronts your backend with routing, rate-limiting, auth, throttling, and request transformation.

Primary source

-   AWS Docs —  [Amazon API Gateway](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/)

### [ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)](/glossary/arr)

SaaS & Billing

Annualised subscription revenue, i.e. MRR × 12. Standard top-line metric for SaaS valuation and growth tracking.

Primary source

-   Stripe —  [Annual recurring revenue](https://stripe.com/resources/more/what-is-annual-recurring-revenue-a-guide-for-saas-businesses)

### [Availability vs Reliability](/glossary/availability-vs-reliability)

Monitoring & Uptime

Availability measures whether a service responds (uptime %). Reliability measures whether it responds correctly and within acceptable latency. A service can be available but unreliable if responses are slow or wrong.

Primary source

-   Google SRE Book —  [Chapter 3: Embracing Risk](https://sre.google/sre-book/embracing-risk/)

### [AWS Lambda](/glossary/aws-lambda)

Platforms

Amazon's serverless function-as-a-service product — runs your code in response to events without you managing servers. Has measurable cold-start latency the first time a function runs after idle.

Primary source

-   AWS Docs —  [AWS Lambda Developer Guide](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/welcome.html)

[Related guide: Monitoring AWS Lambda & API Gateway](/guides/monitoring-aws-lambda-apis)

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