Reference, not a lesson

Glossary

Every term below is one the lab actually teaches and explains, harvested from the lessons, the exam bank, the game round banks and the practice paths across all sixteen weeks. Nothing here is imported from an outside dictionary: if the lab does not use a word or does not explain it, it is not in this list. Each entry names the week it comes from and links back to the page that teaches it.

174
Terms traced to a source
13
Weeks represented
A–Z
Ordered for lookup, not reading order
How to read an entry. The definition is written the way the lab itself explains the term, not copied from an outside glossary. The red badge names the week it comes from; the small grey badge names the specific page, lesson or bank it was drawn from, and the badge links straight to that page. Where the lab uses one word for two genuinely different things in two different weeks (for example service, or Tier 1/2/3), both meanings are kept as separate entries rather than merged, and each one says so.
No terms match that filter.

0–9

301 redirect

An HTTP response telling the browser a move is permanent, which lets a browser or search engine remember the new address and go straight there on future visits.

Week 8game-w8.html

302 redirect

An HTTP response telling the browser a move is only temporary, so the old URL keeps being treated as correct and checked again on the next visit rather than skipped.

Week 8game-w8.html

802.1Q tag

The standard tag a switch adds to a frame crossing a trunk, naming which VLAN the frame belongs to, removed again at the far end.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 7

A

A record

A DNS entry mapping one name to one IPv4 address, such as fs-01.jahez.local to 10.10.60.20.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 6

access port

A switch port belonging to one VLAN, carrying plain untagged frames to a single device such as a PC or a printer, which never has to know a VLAN exists.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 7

access review

A recorded, dated check of who holds which permissions and what was decided about each, kept as evidence that a stated review policy is actually being carried out, not merely written down.

Week 11game-w11.html

access switch

The switch a desk plugs into directly, such as the floor switches at Trio Complex HQ, as opposed to the distribution switch further up.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 1

allowed VLAN list

The set of VLANs a trunk link is configured to carry. A VLAN left off the list is silently dropped at that link even though it exists correctly on both switches, which is a common cause of one floor failing while another is fine.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 7

anomaly detection

A data-mining family that flags a value unlike its neighbours, such as one warranty date eight years out when nothing else is. The value is not impossible, only unusual, which is what makes it worth opening the record rather than deleting or accepting it.

Week 4Exam bank, Data mining

Anscombe's Quartet

Four datasets, built in 1973, that share an identical mean, standard deviation and correlation while looking completely different when actually plotted. The lesson: summary statistics can be identical across wildly different distributions, so plot the data before trusting the summary.

Week 6Insight Path, stage 2

APIPA

The 169.254.x.x address a Windows PC gives itself when it sent a DHCP Discover and heard no reply. It proves the network card and driver worked well enough to ask; the fault is somewhere in the DHCP path, not the card.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 5

asset lifecycle

The five stages a tracked asset passes through: acquire, deploy, operate, maintain, and retire and dispose. Disposal is the stage that leaves the least evidence unless someone deliberately makes it, such as a wipe certificate and a closed record with a disposal date.

Week 4Asset Path, stage 1

association (data mining)

A data-mining family that looks for things that turn up together, such as discovering two fields are always filled in by the same person on the same afternoon, which is a fact about the process rather than the fleet.

Week 4Exam bank, Data mining

availability zone

One or more discrete data centres with their own power and networking, within roughly 100 km of the other zones in the same region. A subnet lives in exactly one availability zone, which is why subnet design is availability design.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 5

B

backup (vs replica)

A separate, restorable copy of data, distinct from high-availability replication: replication copies a mistake (such as a dropped table) at the same speed it copies everything else, so a replica is not a backup.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 5

base-rate neglect

Judging a subgroup's failure count without knowing the size of the group it came from, so a brand with 14 of 20 failures is not necessarily unreliable if it is also three quarters of the whole fleet.

Week 9game-w9.html

baseline (troubleshooting)

A record of what normal looks like, kept so that when something breaks you can tell what actually changed rather than guessing.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 9

bottom-up troubleshooting

A method that starts at the cable and works upward through link, VLAN, address, gateway, name and application. Best when one user or one port fails and the physical layer is the likely suspect.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 9

break-glass account

An account, such as AWS root, reserved for situations where every other form of access has failed, for example an admin having locked everyone out. It must carry MFA and should not be used for routine work.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 3

broadcast address

The last address in a subnet, such as 10.10.60.255, which reaches every host in that subnet and which no single host may be assigned.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 2

broadcast domain

The set of ports a broadcast frame can reach. One VLAN is one broadcast domain, so a broadcast storm in one VLAN never touches another.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 3

business rule duplication

The risk created when the same rule (such as a discount calculation) is written independently in two places, for example inside an app's screen logic and again inside a flow; nothing keeps the two copies in sync, so a change to one silently disagrees with the other.

Week 13game-w13.html

C

calculated column (DAX)

A value computed once, at refresh, and stored on every row of a table, used for anything that has to sit on an axis, in a slicer, or in a legend. It does not respond to a click.

Week 6Insight Path, stage 3

cause code

A short classification recorded against an exception when two systems disagree, explaining why rather than editing either side into silent agreement, which would destroy the evidence of what happened.

Week 4Exam bank, Reconciliation

CDN cache

A copy of a page or asset held by a caching layer in front of the origin server, controlled by cache-control headers such as max-age, which is why a freshly deployed change can still show stale content to visitors for a while.

Week 8game-w8.html

change (work type)

A planned modification to a service, needing approval before anyone touches it. The test: is the current behaviour deliberate? “Can you set the timeout to one hour” is a change, not an incident.

Week 3Desk reference

change authority

Whoever is assigned to approve a given type of change; ITIL 4 does not mandate a single change advisory board, it says assign an authority per change type so it can be delegated, peer reviewed or automated.

Week 3Exam bank, Practices

choice field

A field restricted to a short, fixed list of values, replacing free text that would otherwise be typed as several different spellings of the same idea ("high", "High priority", "URGENT").

Week 12game-w12.html

classification (data mining)

A data-mining family that learns a rule from examples that have already been labelled, the opposite of clustering, which finds its own groupings with no labels supplied.

Week 4Exam bank, Data mining

clean data (three properties)

A dataset is clean when it is consistent (one format, one convention throughout), complete enough (the fields you will actually analyze are filled), and traceable (you can say where it came from and when). Most things people call “data problems” are really consistency problems, and those are also the most fixable.

Week 5Data Path, stage 1

clustering

A data-mining family that groups records by how they behave, such as by age and model, without being handed the groups in advance; you decide afterward whether the groupings it found actually mean anything.

Week 4Exam bank, Data mining

collection log

A written record of source, method, date, what was asked for, what came back, what was missing and why, and what was assumed. A dataset with no log cannot be trusted by anyone who was not there to watch it get built.

Week 4Exam bank, Collection log

configuration item

Any component that needs to be actively managed in order to deliver a service. It is defined by needing to be managed, not by its purchase price.

Week 3Exam bank, Key concepts

confounding / shared cause

A third factor that drives two measurements at once, making them rise and fall together without either causing the other, such as a hiring cycle driving both password resets and printer ink orders every August.

Week 9game-w9.html

continual improvement model

The seven-step cycle: what is the vision, where are we now, where do we want to be, how do we get there, take action, did we get there, how do we keep the momentum. Skipping step two (a baseline) means step six becomes an opinion rather than a measured answer.

Week 3Exam bank, Continual improvement

controlled list

An agreed, short, fixed set of allowed values for a field (for example a status column limited to Deployed, In Stock, Retired) that is then locked so new free-text values cannot be typed in, stopping the same idea being spelled several different ways.

Week 5Data Path / game-w5.html

correlation vs causation

Two numbers moving together, however strongly, is not proof that one causes the other. Establishing cause needs a controlled comparison or ruling out a shared driver, not a stronger-looking chart.

Week 9game-w9.html

custom connector (documentation)

A written description of what a custom connector expects and what it returns, which is what actually turns a personal tool one person built into something a teammate can call; a working connector with no such description is not really usable by anyone else.

Week 14game-w14.html

Cyber GRC (routing)

The single destination for anything suspected security: phishing, suspicious access, possible data exposure, suspected fraud, a device you think is compromised. There is no exception, and being wrong in that direction costs nothing.

Week 3Desk reference

D

dashboard vs report (Power BI)

A dashboard is a single page, pinned from one or more reports, that cannot be filtered or sliced; a report is built on one semantic model, has many pages, and can be filtered every way. Saying “dashboard” to a stakeholder when a filterable report is meant is how the wrong thing gets built.

Week 6Insight Path, stage 3

data mining

Looking for a pattern nobody set out to find, as opposed to reporting, which answers a question that was already asked. “Which laptops are out of warranty” is a report; “devices from one batch fail at twice the rate” is mining.

Week 4Exam bank, Data mining

date dimension

A purpose-built table of every calendar day, contiguous and complete across whole years, used to filter every fact table at once. A column of real purchase dates cannot serve this role because real dates are sparse: a day nobody bought anything simply does not exist in that column.

Week 6Insight Path, stage 3

decorates vs helps (documentation)

The distinction between a document that describes a tool or system in general terms and one that gives the actual step the reader needs. A paragraph explaining what a CMDB module is in general decorates; a line saying which tab to record a serial in helps.

Week 15Documentation Path, stage 4

default gateway

The address of a router interface, in the same subnet as a host, that the host sends to whenever the destination is outside its own subnet.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 4

dependency (systems)

Something a system needs in order to work at all, such as a domain controller needing the hypervisor beneath it running, so that one failure quietly takes several other systems down with it.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 8

DHCP

A protocol in which a server hands a host an IP address, subnet mask, default gateway and DNS servers automatically, for a limited lease period.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 5

dimension table

A table of things that exist, filtered and grouped by but never summed, such as employees, departments, or locations.

Week 6Insight Path, stage 3

disaster recovery

A deliberately invoked response to a major, discrete failure, usually across regions, accepting a period of downtime already agreed in advance, as distinct from high availability, which is continuous and automatic.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 5

divide-and-conquer troubleshooting

A method that starts in the middle of the stack, usually a ping to the gateway, and lets the result decide which half of the problem to keep testing. Suits a vague or unclear symptom.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 9

DNS

The service that turns a name such as fs-01.jahez.local into an address such as 10.10.60.20, so that people and applications can use names instead of numbers.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 6

DNS cache

A DNS answer a machine has stored and keeps reusing for a while. Flushing it (ipconfig /flushdns) forces a fresh lookup, which is why that command sometimes fixes a site that has moved to a new server.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 6

domain-validated certificate

The ordinary kind of TLS certificate almost every site has. It proves only that the connection is encrypted and that whoever requested the certificate could prove control of the domain at issuance; it says nothing about the organization behind the site or the honesty of its content.

Week 8game-w8.html

DORA

The four steps of a DHCP exchange: Discover, Offer, Request, Acknowledge.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 5

E

emergency change

A change with its own faster authorization route for something that must go in immediately, such as a failed server needing a fix that night. It is still authorized, just on a faster path than a normal change.

Week 3Exam bank, Practices

escalation (troubleshooting)

Handing an issue on with the facts you have already proven, rather than with a guess.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 9

event-triggered (flow)

A workflow trigger that fires the moment something happens (such as a record being created), suited to work that has to react instantly rather than wait for a periodic check.

Week 13game-w13.html

F

fact table

A table of things that happened, at a consistent grain, holding numbers to add up and keys pointing out to dimension tables.

Week 6Insight Path, stage 3

field group (asset register)

One of seven groups the asset register's fields are organized into — identity, ownership, lifecycle, financial, contractual, location, status — each answering a different question for a different named consumer, and each measured for completeness on its own rather than averaged into one number.

Week 4Exam bank, Field groups

flow (automation)

Work that needs no human input and follows a fixed, repeatable trigger and sequence, such as a scheduled nightly comparison between two systems; distinct from a screen, which a person operates interactively.

Week 13game-w13.html

four dimensions (ITIL)

The four dimensions of service management: organizations and people, information and technology, partners and suppliers, and value streams and processes, all surrounded by external PESTLE factors nobody controls directly.

Week 3Exam bank, Four dimensions

G

Goodhart's Law

When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. A merchant acceptance rate that is graded starts getting gamed (accept then cancel, quote inflated times, or go offline so no order can be refused) rather than staying an honest reading of anything.

Week 6Insight Path, stage 4

guiding principles (ITIL)

Seven principles that apply across the whole framework: focus on value, start where you are, progress iteratively with feedback, collaborate and promote visibility, think and work holistically, keep it simple and practical, and optimize and automate.

Week 3Exam bank, Guiding principles

H

high availability

Continuous, usually automatic protection so that a failure (such as one data centre going down) is not noticed by users, typically achieved with multiple availability zones.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 5

host

Any device with a network address: a laptop, a printer, or a server.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 1

hypervisor

The host machine that runs virtual machines. If the hypervisor stops, every virtual server running on it stops with it.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 8

I

IaaS

Infrastructure as a Service: raw compute, storage and network handed over, with the customer responsible for everything from the operating system upward, such as Amazon EC2.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 1

IAM role

Permissions with no permanent credentials attached, assumed by a user or a workload to get temporary credentials that expire on their own, which is why AWS recommends roles over long-lived access keys.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 3

impact

How many people or how important a business function is affected: high (a whole site, department or critical service, or money/reputation at risk), medium (a team), or low (one person). Judged separately from urgency.

Week 3Desk reference

incident (work type)

Something that used to work and is now broken. The test: did this work yesterday?

Week 3Desk reference

inter-VLAN routing

Moving packets between two VLANs using a device, typically a layer 3 switch, that holds an interface inside each VLAN.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 4

ip helper-address

A command placed on an SVI that turns a DHCP Discover broadcast into a unicast aimed at the DHCP server, since a broadcast alone cannot cross a router into another VLAN.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 5

IPv4 address

Four numbers from 0 to 255, such as 10.10.10.51, that identify one host on a network.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 2

J

join key

A shared, reliable identifier used to link two datasets together, such as an employee ID rather than a name, since names repeat, change, and get typed inconsistently, and joining on them can silently assign one person's record to another.

Week 5Data Path / game-w5.html

K

KB article

A document written for the user who has the problem, in their own words, with the steps and what to do if they fail; a different document from an SOP, which is written for a colleague performing an internal procedure.

Week 15Documentation Path, stage 1

known error

A problem that has been analyzed and is not yet resolved. Writing it down is what lets the desk apply the workaround in seconds instead of rediscovering it from scratch.

Week 3Exam bank, Practices

L

L1 / L2 / L3 (support tiers)

The routing destinations for a ticket: L1 service desk (password resets, approved access, known how-to answers), L2 technical support (endpoint faults, single-desk issues), and L3 enterprise systems and infrastructure (server/service faults, identity, network design). This is a different taxonomy from the Tier 1/2/3 fault layers taught for network troubleshooting in week 2 games; the two schemes use the same words for different things and are not interchangeable.

Week 3Desk reference

lease (DHCP)

The period a host is allowed to keep an address before it must ask to renew it.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 5

least privilege

Each identity, human or machine, gets the minimum resources and authorizations it needs to do its job. “Each entity” includes machine identities such as an EC2 instance role or a Lambda execution role, not only people.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 3

M

MAC address

A hardware address burned into a network card, which a switch learns and uses to forward each frame only to the port that needs it.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 1

measure (DAX)

A value recalculated live, in the filter context of whatever is on screen, so it changes when a slicer is clicked. Used for anything that has to respond to interaction, such as a total or a percentage.

Week 6Insight Path, stage 3

miss list

The set of records a collection effort could not answer for, with a reason recorded against each row where one is known. Reported separately from a plain hit count, since 562 matches out of 574 attempted still leaves 53 unaccounted for once the 41 that had no serial to look up at all are counted too.

Week 4Exam bank, Collection log

mover access accumulation

The tendency for an employee who changes role or team to keep their old access alongside their new access, because the new grant is actively requested while nobody is watching to remove the old one, which an access review exists to catch.

Week 11game-w11.html

N

named step (Power Query)

A labelled step inside a Power Query cleaning pipeline that records what it does, so the query itself becomes documentation. An unnamed step documents nothing to whoever reads it back later, including the person who wrote it.

Week 5Data Path, stage 2

native VLAN

The one VLAN on a trunk that is sent untagged. It must match at both ends of the trunk, or traffic silently lands in the wrong VLAN.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 7

network ACL

A subnet-level, stateless filter that can both allow and deny traffic and is evaluated in rule-number order, unlike a security group, which only allows and automatically permits return traffic.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 5

NIST SP 800-145

The four-page 2011 US government document that defines IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, and that every auditor and RFP still falls back on, despite predating serverless computing and having no model that covers it.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 1

normal change

A change that is not pre-authorized and not an emergency, going through the change authority for that type before it is made.

Week 3Exam bank, Practices

normalization (by rate)

Dividing a raw count by a period or population before comparing it, such as tickets per week rather than raw ticket totals, so that periods or groups of different size or length can be compared fairly.

Week 9game-w9.html

not IT (routing)

The destination for a request that genuinely belongs to Facilities, HR or Finance. It has to be handed over properly, with a name and a reference, not closed silently.

Week 3Desk reference

O

on-demand pricing

The baseline, no-commitment price for cloud compute, paid only for what actually runs; right for spiky, short-lived or unpredictable workloads.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 5

outcome

What a deliverable makes possible for the person receiving it, as distinct from the output, which is the thing itself. A shared mailbox is the output; replying to customers faster is the outcome.

Week 3Exam bank, Key concepts

output

The literal thing handed over, as distinct from the outcome it enables.

Week 3Exam bank, Key concepts

owner and last-reviewed date

The two things a document needs at its header before anyone will risk trusting and following it: who is accountable for it, and when it was last confirmed still accurate. Missing either one, people ask a person instead of trusting the document.

Week 15Documentation Path, stage 2

P

p50 / p90 (percentile)

The median (p50) and the value that 90 percent of observations fall under (p90) of a distribution, reported alongside a mean because an average can sit flat while the tail people actually experience gets much worse.

Week 6Insight Path, stage 4

PaaS

Platform as a Service: a place to deploy code without choosing or patching the underlying operating system, such as AWS Elastic Beanstalk or App Runner.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 1

PDPL

Saudi Arabia's Personal Data Protection Law. Personal data such as employee names and phone numbers stays inside Jahez systems; it must not be emailed to a personal address or copied to removable media to work on elsewhere, even for convenience.

Week 5Data Path, stage 3

perceptual accuracy ranking

Cleveland and McGill's 1984 finding that people read position along a common scale most accurately, then position on separate scales, then length and angle, then area, then colour last — the reason a sorted bar chart beats a pie chart for comparing categories.

Week 6Insight Path, stage 1

phishing domain vs display name

The distinction between a message's display name, which is just typed text anyone can set to anything, and its actual sending domain, which is far harder to fake convincingly and is the detail that actually reveals a phishing attempt.

Week 11game-w11.html

physical port

The physical socket on a switch that a cable plugs into, such as Gi1/0/12, as distinct from a service port such as 443.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 1

pilot (data handling)

About twenty records checked by hand, one at a time, against the source, run before a bulk import against live records. A hand check finds errors a spot check would miss; a smaller automated import does not.

Week 4Exam bank, Handling

Power Query

The tool used to clean a dataset through a recorded, repeatable sequence of named steps rather than by hand-editing cells, so the same cleaning can be re-run automatically on next month's export.

Week 5Data Path, stage 2

practice (ITIL)

ITIL 4 groups 34 practices into three categories: 14 general management, 17 service management, 3 technical management. ITIL Version 5 keeps the same 34 practices but regroups them into two categories.

Week 3Exam bank, Practices

priority (P1–P5)

The value calculated from impact and urgency together, never chosen directly. P1 is critical (a site, department or critical service down, or money/reputation at risk now); P5 is planning work with no clock on it.

Week 3Desk reference

problem (work type)

Repeated incidents that share one cause, raised by IT rather than by a user. The test: have we fixed this exact thing before?

Week 3Desk reference

proportional ink

The rule that when a shaded area on a chart stands for a number, the area drawn has to be proportional to that number. A bar chart with a truncated axis breaks this rule and can turn a small real difference into what looks like a collapse.

Week 6Insight Path, stage 2

R

raw export (never edit)

The original, untouched export file kept aside as the evidence of what the data looked like before any cleaning. Editing it directly destroys the ability to prove what changed.

Week 5Data Path, stage 2

reconciliation

Comparing two systems that each hold a record of the same population, classifying every exception with a cause code, and leaving the two sides unedited so the disagreement stays visible rather than being erased.

Week 4Asset Path, stage 4

region (cloud)

A named geographic area, such as Bahrain or the UAE for AWS in the Middle East, made up of multiple availability zones. A CDN edge location is not a region: it caches content near users but does not durably store data.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 5

regression to the mean

An extreme result (such as the single worst-performing team in a month) tends to drift back toward average on its own, which can look identical to an intervention having worked unless there is a comparison group that received no intervention.

Week 9game-w9.html

relationship: many-to-many

A data relationship where both sides can hold several of the other, such as a student enrolled in several courses while each course holds several students, requiring a different design than a simple one-to-many link.

Week 12game-w12.html

relationship: one-to-many

A data relationship where one record on one side (such as a vendor) can relate to several records on the other side (such as purchase orders), while each of those relates back to exactly one vendor. The most common relationship shape in a real system.

Week 12game-w12.html

Reserved Instance

An older AWS commitment mechanism tied to a specific instance configuration for one or three years, superseded in guidance by the more flexible Savings Plan.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 5

response bias

Distortion in a survey or feedback channel caused by who chooses to respond, such as a satisfaction pop-up drawing disproportionately from people who are already annoyed.

Week 9game-w9.html

Retired vs Disposed

Two different statuses in the asset register: Retired means withdrawn from service and still physically held; Disposed means gone, with a disposal record. Collapsing the two together is how a fleet count stops meaning anything.

Week 4Exam bank, Format

reverse causation

The possibility that a correlation runs the opposite direction to the one first assumed, such as teams that already trust a process logging more tickets (rather than logging more tickets making people happier).

Week 9game-w9.html

robots.txt

A file stating a site's own preference about automated access. Nothing technically enforces it, which is exactly why it matters: ignoring it is a decision that is on the record afterward.

Week 4Exam bank, Scraping discipline

role (server)

The job a server performs, such as DNS, DHCP, Active Directory or file sharing, as distinct from the service, which is the program actually running that job.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 8

routing table

The list a router checks in order to decide which interface a packet should leave by.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 4

runbook

A document written for whoever is awake and on call while something is actively broken: ordered checks, no theory, ending with who to escalate to and how.

Week 15Documentation Path, stage 1

S

SaaS

Software as a Service: a finished, working application handed to a business user, such as Amazon Connect, with nothing for the customer to patch or manage.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 1

SAN mismatch

A certificate warning that occurs when the hostname in the browser's address bar is not among the names the certificate's subject and subject alternative names actually cover, a different failure from an expired certificate.

Week 8game-w8.html

Savings Plan

A one- or three-year commitment to a spending rate per hour of compute (not to a specific instance type), giving up to about 72 percent off on-demand pricing while staying flexible across instance family, size, OS and region.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 5

screen (app)

An interactive surface a person operates directly, used for a repeated task that differs every time (browsing, filtering, editing); distinct from a report, which is read only, and a flow, which runs on its own with no interaction.

Week 13game-w13.html

security group

An instance-level, stateful firewall in AWS: it remembers a connection it allowed and automatically permits the reply, unlike a network ACL, which has no memory of a connection.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 5

segmentation (VLAN)

Splitting one physical switch into several separate networks to limit broadcast noise and control which groups of devices can reach each other.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 3

self service

A request resolved before it ever reaches the service desk, such as a user resetting their own password through a portal. It counts as a real resolution, and every request that never reaches L1 is capacity L1 gets back.

Week 3Exam bank, Support tiers

semantic model

The current name for what used to be called a dataset in Power BI (the rename is deliberately incomplete: the REST API, activity log and paginated reports still say dataset).

Week 6Insight Path, stage 3

semi-structured data

Data that carries its own keys, such as JSON, so a machine can navigate it, but whose exact shape is not guaranteed to repeat row to row — a field that is only present sometimes has to be handled rather than assumed.

Week 4Exam bank, Data types

separation of duties

The principle that the person requesting something and the person approving it must be different people, so that a self-approval, even if logged, cannot happen.

Week 11game-w11.html

service (ITIL)

A means of enabling value co-creation by facilitating outcomes customers want, without the customer having to manage specific costs and risks themselves. This is a different sense of the word “service” from the Windows/technical background program taught in week 2 (a role such as DNS or DHCP); the two are unrelated meanings of the same word.

Week 3Exam bank, Key concepts

service (server software)

The background program that actually runs a role. A server can be fully powered on and answering ping while a single stopped service means it delivers nothing at all.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 8

service offering

A description of one or more services designed for a target consumer group, which can bundle goods, access to resources, and service actions.

Week 3Exam bank, Key concepts

service request (work type)

Something a person wants that is normal, agreed and predefined, such as access from a catalogue. The test: did they ever have it? Urgency does not turn a request into an incident.

Week 3Desk reference

service value chain

An operating model, not a fixed process: six activities (plan, improve, engage, design and transition, obtain/build, deliver and support) with no fixed order, since Plan and Improve run continuously and any real piece of work follows its own path through the rest.

Week 3Exam bank, Value chain

service value system

The whole system that turns opportunity and demand into value, made of five components: guiding principles, governance, the service value chain, the practices, and continual improvement.

Week 3Exam bank, Service value system

shared account (risk)

A login used by more than one person. Every action it takes lands in a log against one name that is not a person, so nobody can say afterward who was actually at the keyboard for a given action.

Week 11game-w11.html

shared responsibility model

AWS's split between “security of the cloud” (AWS's job: physical security, the hypervisor) and “security in the cloud” (the customer's job: the operating system, data, identity and configuration). The exact line moves depending on the service chosen, but the customer's data, identity and configuration never move off the customer's side.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 2

Simpson's paradox

A pattern where a trend appears in every subgroup of data but reverses or disappears when the subgroups are pooled together, because the groups differ in some other way that pooling hides.

Week 6Insight Path, stage 2

single point of failure

One item whose loss takes several dependent systems down at once, such as a hypervisor with no second hypervisor behind it.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 8

SMB

The protocol Windows uses to serve file shares.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 8

SNI

Server Name Indication: the part of the TLS handshake where the browser states, in plain text, which hostname it wants before encryption is agreed, which is what lets one IP address host many independent HTTPS sites, each with its own certificate.

Week 8game-w8.html

"so what" chain

A discipline for finishing an analysis: state the observation, say what it means, and name an action with an owner and a date attached. If the chain cannot reach an owner and a date, the metric being reported is probably the wrong one.

Week 6Insight Path, stage 5

SOP

A Standard Operating Procedure: a repeatable procedure written for a colleague who has not done the task before, with an owner, a last-reviewed date, prerequisites, one numbered action per step, how to confirm success, and an escalation path.

Week 15Documentation Path, stage 1

source and refresh path

Two facts that must be recorded beside any field: where the value came from, and what keeps it true afterward (such as a scheduled re-run). A field with a source but no refresh path goes stale within a quarter with nothing to flag it.

Week 4Exam bank, Source and refresh

Spot Instance

AWS compute offered at up to about 90 percent off on-demand price, with the trade-off that AWS can reclaim the instance when it needs the capacity back; suited only to work that can be interrupted and restarted.

Week 7Cloud Path, stage 5

SRV record

A DNS entry naming which server offers a particular service, used by Active Directory clients to locate a domain controller. No answer here means no domain controller found, so logon fails even though the file server itself may be fine.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 6

standard change

A change that is pre-authorized once as a type, low risk, and follows a known procedure, so it does not need approval repeated every time it recurs.

Week 3Exam bank, Practices

structured data

Data where a header row is a contract: every row means the same thing in the same column, such as a Jira Assets export with identical columns throughout.

Week 4Exam bank, Data types

subnet mask

The value that marks which part of an IP address is the network and which part is the host, and so decides whether a destination is local or has to be routed.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 2

SVI

A virtual interface on a layer 3 switch that holds the default-gateway address for one VLAN.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 4

synchronization (data)

An explicit rule saying which system wins per field when two systems disagree, so a disagreement becomes a difference list somebody works through rather than the more recently edited value silently winning with no record of whose it was.

Week 4Exam bank, Synchronization

system of record

The one system authoritative for a given field, decided per field rather than per asset — for example Intune owns last check-in, the asset register owns assignment and status, and Finance owns cost and net book value.

Week 4Exam bank, Reconciliation

T

Tier 1 / Tier 2 / Tier 3 (fault layers)

In the Ops Range and its game, the three layers a network fault can live at: Tier 1 the access layer (cable, port, VLAN), Tier 2 routing, DHCP and DNS, and Tier 3 servers and services. This is a different scheme from the L1/L2/L3 support-routing tiers taught in week 3; see the note under L1/L2/L3.

Week 2Ops Range fault bank / game-w2.html

timer-triggered (flow)

A workflow trigger that runs on a recurring schedule rather than reacting to a single event, suited to conditions that accumulate over time (such as an invoice sitting unpaid past a threshold) rather than to one moment.

Week 13game-w13.html

top-down troubleshooting

A method that starts at the application and works downward through the same layers as bottom-up. Best when the lower layers are already proven, for example when everyone else on the network is fine.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 9

trunk port

A switch port that carries several VLANs over one cable between switches, tagging each frame with the VLAN it belongs to.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 7

TTL (DNS)

The time a DNS answer may be cached by a resolver before it must be checked again. A record changed right now is not reliably seen everywhere until the old TTL has fully expired.

Week 8game-w8.html

TXT verification record

A DNS record added to prove control of a domain to a third-party provider (for example before it will send mail as that domain or issue it a certificate); it proves DNS control at that moment, nothing about the site's safety or billing.

Week 8game-w8.html

U

unclassified difference

The honest way to report a gap between two systems counting overlapping but different populations (for example roughly 843 Windows devices in Intune against 615 laptops in the asset register) before every row has been given a cause code, rather than calling the raw gap "missing assets."

Week 4Asset Path, stage 4

unstructured data

Data with no fixed shape at all, such as a sentence in an email that happens to mention three asset tags. The label describes the container, not the value of what is inside it; the tags themselves are perfectly good data sitting somewhere no report will reach.

Week 4Exam bank, Data types

uplink

The cable joining an access switch to the distribution switch above it.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 1

urgency

How fast a ticket must move: high (work stopped now, or a same-day deadline), medium (degraded, with a workaround), or low (can wait). Judged separately from impact.

Week 3Desk reference

user / customer / sponsor

Three roles in a service relationship that can be held by one person or split across several: the user uses the service, the customer defines requirements and agrees outcomes, and the sponsor authorizes the budget.

Week 3Exam bank, Key concepts

utility

What a service does; whether it is fit for purpose. Paired with warranty, which is how well it does it.

Week 3Exam bank, Key concepts

V

value (ITIL)

The outcome achieved minus the costs and risks the consumer is left carrying. A cheap service that leaves the user doing a manual workaround has reduced value, because the workaround is a cost the user still carries.

Week 3Exam bank, Key concepts

value stream

A path through the service value chain defined once for one type of work; not a seventh activity, and not redrawn for every ticket. Different kinds of work take different paths through the same six activities.

Week 3Exam bank, Value streams

vendor (routing)

The destination for a system a third party runs and Corporate IT does not. The ticket and its updates are still owned internally even while the fix itself sits with the vendor.

Week 3Desk reference

VLAN

A group of switch ports configured to behave as their own separate network and broadcast domain, letting one physical switch carry several logically separate networks.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 3

VLAN ID

The number, from 1 to 4094, that identifies a VLAN on a switch.

Week 2Academy, Lesson 3

W

warehousing (data)

Deliberately keeping historical copies of a live system's state, taken as a decision before the period you will need them, since a live register only ever answers what is true now, and a backup restores a system rather than giving you a series to report on.

Week 4Exam bank, Warehousing

warranty (ITIL)

How well a service performs: whether it is available, capable, secure and continuous enough. Paired with utility, which is what the service does.

Week 3Exam bank, Key concepts

wide vs long (data shape)

Two ways to lay out the same data: wide puts one column per category (for example one column per month), long puts one row per observation with a category column. Long is the shape a chart, a pivot or a database wants; wide is for reading on paper.

Week 5Data Path / game-w5.html

workaround

A way to reduce or remove the impact of a problem while its underlying cause is still there, such as rebooting a machine or using a different printer. It does not remove the cause, and some workarounds stay in place permanently when fixing the cause is not worth the cost.

Week 3Exam bank, Practices

Z

zone apex

The bare root of a domain (example.com with no www). It always carries an SOA and NS record, so it can never also carry a CNAME record, which is why the bare domain sometimes needs a plain A/AAAA record instead of a CNAME.

Week 8game-w8.html

Where this glossary needs to be linked from

This page is not yet linked from anywhere else in the lab. It was built as a standalone reference, the same way design.html is, and it is deliberately not wired into index.html, games.html or any week page, because those are being edited elsewhere at the same time this page was built. It belongs on the main navigation alongside the desk reference, and a "see also" link from desk-reference.html and from each week's path.html and exam.html page back to the specific letter here would close the loop the teach skill asks for: lessons and reference documents linking to each other.