Glossary
- Anomaly
- A request that looks broken in the capture itself, such as a status of
0. validate counts them. See Validate a capture.
- Baseline
- A capture of the same flow from a build you accept, used by
compare as the thing to measure against. See Compare against a baseline.
- Blob
- A long path segment that looks like an encoded or random value, shown as
{blob}. See Entries, ids and endpoints.
- Bottleneck
- The phase of a request that took the longest, named by
slowest. See Timing phases.
- Cascade
- A failure followed within a window by several more. The later ones are downstream. See Cascade.
- Cooldown
- The period a server's
Retry-After header asks a client to wait. A call inside it is a cooldown violation. See Rate limits.
- Correlation id
- An identifier a server puts in its response headers, such as
x-request-id, so that a request can be found in its logs. See Errors.
- Duplicate
- A request with the same fingerprint as another. See Duplicates.
- Endpoint
- A method, a host and a normalized path. See Entries, ids and endpoints.
- Entry
- One request and its response, as recorded in a HAR. WireTrail names entries
e000000, e000001, and so on, in file order.
- Envelope
- The outer JSON object every command prints with
--json: tool, schema_version, command, capture, result, warnings and next_commands. See JSON schemas.
- Evidence
- The entry ids behind a finding.
- Filter
- A set of
key:value clauses given with --filter that limits a command to some requests. See Filter entries.
- Fingerprint
- The method, host, normalized path and query of a request, without cache-buster keys. Requests with the same fingerprint are duplicates.
- Finding
- A ranked item from
summary, diagnose or auto, with a severity, a reason and evidence. See How findings are ranked.
- HAR
- HTTP Archive: a JSON file that records the requests and responses of a session. See Get a HAR.
- Normalized path
- A URL path with its identifiers replaced by
{id} and its opaque segments by {blob}.
- N+1
- One request for a list followed by one request for each item. See Pagination and N+1.
- Offset
- The time from the start of the capture to the start of a request, in milliseconds.
- Opaque
- Looks like a long random value. WireTrail masks opaque values wherever it finds them, with the exceptions on How redaction works.
- Phase
- One step in the life of a request:
blocked, dns, connect, ssl, send, wait, receive.
- p50, p95
- The median, and the value that 95 percent of requests are below.
- Recommendation
- A ranked item from
summary or auto: a severity, a reason, the evidence, and the command to run next. diagnose shows the same items as findings.
- Redaction
- Replacing a secret with
<redacted> in output. See How redaction works.
- Retry
- A request that repeats a call after an attempt that failed with a 5xx, a 429 or no status. See Retries.
- Severity
critical, high, medium or low: a rule's judgement of how likely a pattern is to matter. See How findings are ranked.- Storm
- Many calls to one host or endpoint within a short window. See Storms.
- Subsystem
- A named group of hosts, from your configuration file or a built-in vendor list. See Hosts, subsystems and endpoints.
- TTFB
- Time to first byte: the
wait phase.
- Volatile
- A body key that changes on every call, such as a timestamp. See What varies between calls.