Glossary

The words the console, the API and these pages use, in plain terms.

Term	Meaning
Action	One consequential thing an agent can ask for, such as endpoint.isolate or identity.disable. The action catalog lists them.
Admin consent	How a Microsoft Entra directory is connected from the console: a Global Administrator or Privileged Role Administrator of the directory signs in with Microsoft and approves read-only access for the deployment's own app (the platform app). Only the directory withdraws it, by removing the app's enterprise application; revoking the connection here stops collection.
Agent	A tool that calls ExecBound: a coding agent, an MCP server, a workflow. Each has its own identity, API keys and activity.
API key	An agent's credential, sent as Authorization: Bearer <API key>. Shown once when issued; revocable; expires unless issued to never expire.
Approval	A person's decision on one pending request. It authorizes that exact plan once, before its deadline, and nothing else.
Approval deadline	How long a pending request waits for a decision: 120 seconds unless an administrator sets it between 120 and 3,600 seconds or turns it off.
Audit history	The append-only record of every request, decision, approval and change. Replay checks it offline.
Budget	A policy limit on how many distinct targets an action may touch in a window, before it asks a person or refuses.
Bundle	A compiled policy: the Cedar ExecBound decides with, its budgets and its settings. Written once and never changed.
Checkpoint grant	The answer when an external executor, not ExecBound, performs the action: what it may do once, and the secret that settles it. Neither an execution nor an approval. See the external execution checkpoint.
Collector	The process that collects monitoring connections on their schedule. It alone holds what opens a connection's credential: operator key files, the private key that opens a key pasted in the console, and the platform app's certificate. The web service holds only the collector's public key and the platform app's public values.
Connector account	A provider account ExecBound acts through, holding the credential the agent never sees.
Continuation	A short-lived signed token a pending approval's answer carries, for reading its status. Not an approval.
Emergency stop	An administrator's switch that stops a workspace admitting, deciding or dispatching anything new. Requests answer 423 TENANT_STOPPED until it is lifted.
Enforcement mode	How much a path's decision can actually prevent: native, integrated, embedded, advisory, observed or unknown. See the enforcement modes.
Execute, Gate, Monitor	The three placements. Execute: ExecBound performs the action. Gate: ExecBound decides and an external executor performs it. Monitor: ExecBound observes and alerts, and prevents nothing.
Decision coverage	For each Space and each action its active policy can hold, how many people can decide it now, and which recently requested resources nobody, or too few, can. Shown to a workspace administrator on Approval rules; a preview, checked again when a request is reviewed.
Effect unknown	An outcome whose effect nobody has established, such as an executor reporting failure after the call went out. It stays open on Home until an administrator settles it from evidence.
Execution	One proposed action and everything that happened to it, from the request to its outcome.
Fact	Something ExecBound knows about a target from a trusted source, such as its environment or its incident's severity. Never taken from the agent's request.
Idempotency key	The key that makes a repeated request return the same execution instead of acting twice. Derived from reference when the agent sends one.
Incident	The case an action responds to. The agent names it; ExecBound reads its status and severity from its own sources.
Lapsed	An approval whose deadline passed before anybody decided it. The console says so as soon as the deadline passes; nothing ran, and the agent must send a new request. An approval a person approved and the agent did not use in time reads "Approved, but not used".
Mapping	The link from an action a workspace offers to the provider operation that performs it.
Observe-only	A mode in which nothing is executed and each request records what would have been decided.
Overdue (collection)	A monitoring connection no collection run has been recorded for in a day (one the collector opens itself, such as a sealed key's, in twice its own interval if that is sooner), or no inventory sync in two days. Monitoring says so in place of "Collecting"; what it shows may be out of date.
Plan hash	A fingerprint of the frozen plan: the action, target, facts and settings a decision was made on. An approval is bound to it.
Policy	What agents may do on their own, what needs a person, and what never happens. Written as a ruleset. See Write a policy.
Platform app	The deployment's own Microsoft Entra app registration, which every directory that gives admin consent consents to. It holds read-only permissions only, and its certificate, which reads every consenting directory, is the collector's alone.
Quorum	How many different people must approve a request a rule sends for review, from 2 to 5.
Quiet (monitoring)	A reporting source whose heartbeat went stale, or a collection that is overdue. The count beside Monitoring shows quiet items when no finding is open. Quiet is not evidence that nothing happened.
Reference	The ticket, case or run an action answers, sent with the request. ExecBound derives the idempotency key from it.
Reporting source	One Tines story registered to send events about itself to ExecBound's intake, with its own token. The token authorizes intake for that story only: it cannot run actions, approve requests or read anything. It is minted from the console where the deployment connects Tines there, for 1, 7 or 30 days, or from the command line for up to 24 hours, and is shown once. See Tines monitoring.
Request reference	The short workspace-unique name of an execution, such as EB-1042. See request references.
Reviewer	A person with review permissions for an action and target, who may approve or deny it.
Rule	One line of a policy: an action, an effect (ALLOW, DENY or REVIEW) and the conditions it applies under.
Sealed key	A monitoring key pasted in the console, encrypted to the collector's public key before it is stored, bound to its workspace and connection. This web service cannot read it back; only the collector opens it.
Space	A partition of a workspace with its own agents, active policy and budgets.
Target	The thing an action acts on: an endpoint, an identity.
Trusted context	The facts a decision is made on, each from a source ExecBound trusts and no older than the policy allows. See trusted context.
Unrouted request	A held request fewer people can decide than it needs, so it cannot be approved as things stand. A workspace administrator is told on Home and Approvals, with a link to the request and to decision coverage.
Workspace	One organization's ExecBound, with its own users, agents, policies and data. The API and data model call it a tenant.