> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.aiaxoniq.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Glossary

> Every term used across this documentation, defined once — including the pairs that are routinely confused with each other.

Terms as they are used here. Where a word means something specific in
aiAxonIQ, that meaning is the one below.

## The pairs people confuse

Worth reading even if you skip the rest.

| These two                                                               | Are not the same                                                                                                                       |
| :---------------------------------------------------------------------- | :------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **License key** and **session token**                                   | A license key sends telemetry. A session token uses the product. Neither works in the other's place.                                   |
| **Accepted** and **queryable**                                          | `202` means the receiver took it. It becomes searchable seconds later.                                                                 |
| **Zero-code instrumentation** (eBPF) and **auto-instrumentation** (SDK) | One observes from the kernel with no code change; the other is a library in your process. Both are called "zero-code" by the industry. |
| **AI features** and **LLM observability**                               | AI aiAxonIQ runs over *your telemetry*, versus monitoring *your own* model calls.                                                      |
| **Service map** and **network topology**                                | Logical calls between named services, versus observed network connections.                                                             |
| **Audit log** and **security events**                                   | Changes to your aiAxonIQ organization, versus detections about your systems.                                                           |
| **Alert rule** and **SLO**                                              | Fires when a condition holds now, versus tracking a budget over a window.                                                              |

## A–Z

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="Agent (zero-code)" icon="microchip">
    The eBPF process that observes services from the kernel and exports OTLP.
    Upstream OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation, unmodified. See
    [Zero-code instrumentation](/zero-code/overview).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="AgentSight" icon="robot">
    Kernel-level observation of what AI agents do — processes spawned,
    connections opened, files touched. A different product from the zero-code
    agent. See [AgentSight](/guides/agentsight/overview).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Attribute" icon="tags">
    A key-value pair on telemetry. **Resource attributes** describe the emitter
    and appear on every record it produces; **span** and **log attributes**
    describe one event. See
    [Resource attributes](/send-data/otel/resource-attributes).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Auditor" icon="clipboard-list">
    A role that reads the audit log and can change nothing. Deliberately not a
    rung on the Viewer → Editor → Admin → Owner ladder. See
    [Roles](/concepts/roles).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Burn rate" icon="fire">
    How fast an error budget is being consumed, relative to the rate that would
    exactly exhaust it over the window. See [SLOs](/guides/slos/overview).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Capability profile" icon="layer-group">
    A named Linux capability set for the zero-code agent — A, B or C. The
    privilege decision, made explicitly. See
    [Capability profiles](/zero-code/profiles).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Cardinality" icon="hashtag">
    The number of distinct label combinations on a metric. Every combination is
    a separate stored series, which is what drives metric cost — not the number
    of samples. See
    [cardinality](/concepts/data-model#cardinality-is-the-cost-you-cannot-see).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Collector" icon="server">
    The OpenTelemetry Collector: receives, transforms and forwards telemetry,
    and collects host and container metrics itself. See
    [Collector configuration](/send-data/otel/collector-config).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="eBPF" icon="microchip">
    A Linux facility for running verified programs inside the kernel, attached
    to events. What makes zero-code instrumentation possible. See
    [How eBPF works](/zero-code/ebpf).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Error budget" icon="bullseye">
    The amount of failure an SLO permits — the gap between the target and 100%.
    See [SLOs](/guides/slos/overview).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="License key" icon="key">
    The credential authenticating ingest, sent as `X-License-Key`. Decides
    which organization data lands in. Shown once. See
    [License keys](/get-started/license-keys).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Live tail" icon="signal-stream">
    Streaming telemetry as it arrives. Not a search over history — nothing that
    arrived before you connected appears. See
    [Live tail](/guides/logs/live-tail).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Log pattern" icon="layer-group">
    The template behind many similar log lines, discovered by clustering
    bodies. See [Log patterns](/guides/logs/patterns).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Organization" icon="building">
    The unit everything belongs to — telemetry, keys, users, plan. The
    isolation boundary. See [Organizations](/concepts/organizations).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="OTLP" icon="tower-broadcast">
    OpenTelemetry Protocol, the wire format for logs, metrics and traces. Over
    HTTP or gRPC. See [Ingest endpoints](/send-data/endpoints).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="RED metrics" icon="chart-simple">
    Rate, Errors, Duration — the three numbers that describe a service's
    health. Derived from spans, so instrumenting for traces produces them for
    free.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Rollup" icon="chart-area">
    A pre-aggregated metric table at one-minute or one-hour resolution. Why a
    wide time range answers at coarser resolution, and why metrics outlive
    logs. See [Data retention](/concepts/retention).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Sampling" icon="percent">
    Keeping a fraction of traces. **Head** sampling decides at the start; **tail**
    sampling decides after the outcome is known. See
    [Sampling](/send-data/otel/sampling).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Snapshot" icon="camera">
    A read-only, point-in-time copy of a dashboard at a public URL — the one
    door for sharing outside your organization. See
    [Dashboards](/guides/dashboards/overview).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Span" icon="share-nodes">
    One operation within a trace, with a duration, a status and attributes.
    Nesting is causality. See [Traces](/guides/traces/overview).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Synthetic check" icon="heart-pulse">
    A check run against your endpoints from outside — HTTP, SSL, DNS, TCP or
    multi-step. The only signal that exists when your code does not run. See
    [Synthetic monitoring](/guides/synthetics/overview).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Trace" icon="diagram-project">
    One request's journey across services, made of spans linked by a shared
    `trace_id` propagated on every hop.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="traceparent" icon="link">
    The W3C header carrying trace context between services. Its absence is why
    a trace has a hole in it.
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>

## Next

<CardGroup cols={3}>
  <Card title="Signals and the data model" icon="diagram-project" href="/concepts/data-model">
    How these fit together.
  </Card>

  <Card title="FAQ" icon="circle-question" href="/support/faq">
    Short answers to common questions.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Platform architecture" icon="sitemap" href="/concepts/architecture">
    The machinery behind the words.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>