Field reference

Correspondence arriving at the service desk

A message sent to the address published on this site arrives in a mailbox belonging to the company, and the reply travels back over the same route, so both sides of the exchange sit in that mailbox for as long as the thread is live.

• enquiry.email
• enquiry.name
• enquiry.company
• enquiry.subject
• enquiry.body
• enquiry.received_header

Retention: the thread stays in the mailbox while the enquiry is open and for the settling period after the last reply; closure of the enquiry with no engagement following it ends the retention and the thread is deleted.

Notes taken while a system is being assessed

An assessment produces a findings note describing the client’s own application: the hosts it runs on, the integration points it exposes, and the accounts that hold access to it. The account entries name roles and login identifiers supplied by the client, since a list of who can reach a system is part of what makes the note useful to whoever inherits it.

• assessment.client_org
• assessment.system_name
• assessment.host_inventory
• assessment.notes
• assessment.account_role
• assessment.account_identifier

Retention: the note is held for the length of the engagement and the retention period written into it; expiry of that period ends the retention, and the client’s own copy remains with the client.

Records carried across during an integration

A join built between two of a client’s applications carries the client’s own records, and while it is being built and tested those records pass through this office in sample form so that the named conditions can be exercised against something real rather than against something invented. A sample is drawn from the client’s system with the client’s agreement, and what it contains is whatever the interface itself carries.

• sample.interface_ref
• sample.record_payload
• sample.field_map
• sample.quarantine_reason
• sample.taken_from

Retention: a sample is held while the interface it belongs to is being built and tested, together with the period the engagement sets aside for defects found after go-live; the close of that period ends the retention and the sample is destroyed along with the working files around it.

Contacts recorded against an alerting threshold

Every alerting condition in a runbook names the person to be reached when it fires, together with the hours inside which that contact applies, because an alert with no destination has nowhere to go and becomes a line in a log that nobody reads.

• alerting.contact_name
• alerting.contact_role
• alerting.contact_email
• alerting.contact_phone
• alerting.hours
• alerting.threshold

Retention: a contact entry is held while the job or host it belongs to is under an active arrangement; the client naming a replacement, or the arrangement ending, closes the entry and it is removed at the next revision of the runbook.

The runbook copy retained by this office

The document handed over at the end of an engagement is also kept here, so that a question arriving later can be answered against the same text the client is reading rather than against a recollection of it. It carries the job entries, their owners and thresholds, and the retention schedule agreed for the client’s backups.

• runbook.engagement_ref
• runbook.job_name
• runbook.job_owner_role
• runbook.threshold_value
• runbook.retention_schedule
• runbook.handover_record

Retention: the copy is held for the period stated in the engagement and each revision supersedes the one before it; the end of that period ends the retention and the copy is destroyed.

Figures typed into the working figures on the front sheet

The two sets of arithmetic on the front sheet — the retention schedule and the interface effort lines — are worked out by a script that runs inside the browser that opened the page, and the numbers entered stay in that page for as long as it is open. Closing the tab is the end of them, and they reach this office only if somebody chooses to repeat them in a message to the service desk.

• widget.dataset_size_gb
• widget.change_rate_pct
• widget.copies_per_tier
• widget.systems_count
• widget.interfaces_per_system
• widget.hours_per_interface

Retention: the figures live in the open page and nowhere else, so the retention is the life of the tab; a figure repeated into an e-mail becomes part of the correspondence block at the head of this sheet and follows that retention instead.

Typefaces requested by this page

The two typefaces used across this site — Familjen Grotesk for the headings and Newsreader for the body text — are fetched from Google’s font servers when a page here is opened. That request is made by the browser directly to Google, which therefore sees the request as any web server sees one, including the address it came from and the browser identifying itself. Google’s own terms govern what happens to that request at their end.

• font_request.origin_ip
• font_request.user_agent
• font_request.referring_page

Retention: the record of that request lives with Google under Google’s retention terms, and this office reads the fonts served back and keeps the request itself with the browser cache that holds them.

Requests served by the host of this site

The service that publishes these pages writes an ordinary access record for each page it hands out, in the way every web server does, and that record is what would be read if the site behaved oddly and the cause needed finding.

• request.path
• request.status_code
• request.origin_ip
• request.user_agent
• request.timestamp

Retention: the access record is held on the rolling window operated by the hosting service, and each new entry displaces the oldest one once that window is full.

What ends each retention, side by side

The retention lines above are written out in full inside each block, and they are gathered here in one table so that the event which closes a record can be found without reading the whole sheet. The right-hand column names the event rather than a duration, because most of these records end on something happening rather than on a clock running out.

Asking this office for a copy of a block

A request for a copy of any block above, for a correction to a field inside one, or for erasure where the retention line has already run out, reaches the company at servicedesk@alpinetechnica.website or by post to the registered office. The mailbox behind that address belongs to Alpine Technica Ltd and is read by the people doing the work described across these sheets.

A request of this kind is answered from the same records it asks about, which is why the field names above are given exactly as they appear in them, and why a request that quotes a field name is usually the quickest to settle. Where a record originates with a client rather than with this office — an assessment note about the client’s own system, for instance — the reply says so and names the client, since the copy held here is the second one.

A request about a block that has already ended its retention is answered with the date the block closed and the event that closed it, which is the only thing remaining to say about it.