Concepts

These are the load-bearing decisions behind enodia’s design. Understanding them explains a lot of behavior that would otherwise look arbitrary.

Two phases, deliberately separable

Collection talks to your services. Evaluation talks to the internet (vendor lifecycle calendars). In a lot of real infrastructure, nothing has network access to both at once.

collect  →  inventory.jsonl  →  evaluate  →  assessment  →  render

# inside the closed network - no internet needed
enodia collect --config config.yaml -o inventory.jsonl

# anywhere else - no access to your services needed
enodia check --from inventory.jsonl

enodia check with no --from is these two phases composed in one process, not a second code path — the inventory produced along the way is a real, first-class artifact (with its own schema and version), not just an in-memory intermediate value.

Three orthogonal axes, not one status

A branch can be perfectly healthy while a newer major exists — Confluence 10 LTS is current within its branch, actively supported, and a newer major has shipped, all at once. Collapsing that into a single status throws away the information you actually wanted.

Axis	Values
Patch	current · behind · ahead · unknown
Lifecycle	active · security · eol · unknown
Newer branch	latest · newer · newer_lts · unknown

ahead isn’t exotic — release candidates and calendar lag between a vendor’s announcement and their download page produce it routinely.

Facts and judgement are separate

An Observation holds what was actually seen: a version string, whether the target was reachable, what error (if any) occurred. An Assessment holds what enodia’s policy thinks about those facts — severity, computed on top, from policy you control.

Exporting --format json emits facts. A consumer with different priorities can apply their own policy on top instead of enodia’s. Baking severity into the observation itself would make that impossible.

Time is a parameter

Evaluation takes an explicit asOf timestamp — nothing in the evaluation path calls the system clock directly. check --from takes asOf from the inventory’s own header (collectedAt), so a month-old inventory is evaluated as of when it was collected, not silently re-judged against today. Re-running the same evaluation later produces the same result.

Probes are compiled in, not a YAML DSL

Every vendor’s API differs enough that a declarative probe language only looks general right up until the first vendor outside the set it was built for. Each probe is one Go file with one explicit entry in a registry — encoding vendor knowledge in code means an if is just an if, readable and debuggable, instead of a conditional re-expressed in YAML.

This means adding a new product needs a release, not just an edit to your own config. The escape hatch: product: generic accepts a parser spec (json / xml / header / plaintext / regex) directly from your config, for the in-house systems that will never get a dedicated probe — see Configuration. The generic probe’s vocabulary is deliberately frozen: no conditionals, no loops, no chained requests. A target that needs any of that needs a real probe, written in Go.

HTTPS first, credentials never sent in the clear by default

Scheme resolution for a target with no explicit https:///http:// in its address: try https first, fall back to http, and warn either way. enodia never tries http first — the first request would already carry a credential in the clear, and a later redirect to https wouldn’t un-send it. An http:// target with credentials attached is a hard error unless allow_insecure_transport: true is set on that specific service.

No built-in web server that polls on request

enodia serve and export --format html both show the latest finished snapshot — neither one ever triggers a fresh collection in response to a request. A refresh button that polls your entire fleet on every click is a self-inflicted denial-of-service against your own production. Collection runs on a schedule (serve --interval, or cron/a systemd timer regenerating an HTML export); HTTP only ever reads whatever the last successful cycle produced.