AutopilotMonitor/docs/index.md

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Autopilot Monitor — Technical Knowledge Bundle

Contributor-facing technical documentation for Autopilot Monitor, organized as an Open Knowledge Format (OKF) knowledge bundle. Customer-facing product documentation lives at https://docs.autopilotmonitor.com (separate repository).

Architecture

• Architecture Guide - High-level architecture overview and solution layout for contributors.
• Version Contract - One version shape for agent, backend and MCP: the ETag-CAS counter blob that mints build numbers, and the manifests published only after a deploy is verified live.
• Customer Script Publishing - How the customer-facing PowerShell scripts reach download.autopilotmonitor.com/agent/, why publishing is decoupled from agent releases, and the guards keeping the published copy, the version badge and the portal's version oracle in agreement.
• URL Registry - Every well-known host lives in one registry file per component (Constants.cs / utils/config.ts / src/config.ts), enforced by guard tests; includes the agent-download migration to the download alias and its deploy-order constraint.
• Drift Guards - The 2026-08 fragility-audit follow-up contracts: SignalR message-name catalog (typed on both ends), the inverted-tick RowKey codec, tombstone table tagging, the shrink-only OkAsync baseline, per-section config PATCH with the section field map, and the web's scoped-endpoint builders + sidebar visibility matrix.

Agent

• V2 Agent - How the on-device agent works: runtime overview, decision engine (reducer, signals, completion arms), logs & persistence (signal log, snapshot, crash recovery), diagnostics package (built-in section catalog shared with the portal, RealmJoin/Device Preparation collection gates, caps, manifest), Hello wizard un-skip (why a single "WHfB disabled" read never decides completion), Autopilot ZTD diagnostics (event IDs, diagnostic registry, endpoints, error-code map).
• Build Counter Blob - How agent build numbers are minted: shared counter blob with ETag-CAS so local and CI builds never collide; CI additionally attests build provenance (Sigstore).
• Agent Endpoint Migration - How the backend re-homes agents to a new API base URL via the config channel (backend move or per-tenant region move): live-fetch-only, allowlist-validated on both sides, one hop, kill wins.
• Gather Rule Debug Log - EnableGatherRuleDebugLog (ConfigVersion 36): the per-tenant local trace file that explains every gather-rule evaluation decision — scope skips, on_change suppression, empty collector results, logparser position/parse-mode outcomes — for rules that produce no timeline events.
• MDM Reboot Coalescing - Attributing the mid-ESP coalesced reboot ("second sign-in") to the device-assigned policy URIs that forced it: aggregated DM-Enterprise 2800 observations (neutral, flush-time watermark) + the ANALYZE-ESP-005 advisory gated on an actually-observed reboot.
• ESP Completion Starvation — the sits-d Cloud-PC complex - Why a SkipUser=true flow (no user ESP page → no Shell-Core 62407, no AccountSetup registry) left the completion gate satisfied but never evaluated — five Cloud PCs idled six hours at "waiting on: hello_resolution" — and the fix: the observed skip stands in for the final-exit evidence in the IME user-session completion attempt. Plus the two adjacent defects fixed alongside: the edge-only user-apps-settled synthesis (now level-triggered) and the never-wired Shell-Core restart replay (now Hello-wizard-only, with the reasoning why a replayed 62407 must never reach the reducer).
• Secure Boot CA-2023 Detection - Why ANALYZE-SEC-001 v3 reads the UEFI db/KEK variables directly instead of trusting the SecureBoot\Servicing registry, and how the one-sided uefiCa2023FirmwareConfirmed marker plus a not_exists precondition give absence-tolerant suppression across old and new agents.
• Continue-Anyway Observation Mode - EnableEspContinueAnywayObservation (ConfigVersion 37, operator-set): Device-phase ESP terminal failures on Continue-Anyway profiles get a bounded 60-min observation instead of an immediate hard fail; the DAD-validated real-user desktop + Hello gate detect the true end, the session completes Succeeded + EspSoftFailure (amber "with issues" badge), expiry un-defangs to the original esp_terminal_failure.
• CMTrace Time Resolution - Converting bias-less CMTrace local times to UTC without trusting any process's timezone belief: per-line self-anchoring on the 15-minute offset grid for provably fresh lines, uniform marked reader-zone fallback for backlog, and the provenance vocabulary (bias / line-anchored / reader-zone-fallback) that keeps every event re-derivable.
• Registry App-State Second Pillar - IME's authoritative per-app state read straight from the registry (Win32Apps EnforcementStateMessage, EspTrackingWin32Apps, StatusServiceReports) via a snapshot-and-diff watcher; registry/log reconciliation doubles as the built-in IME log-pattern drift alarm.
• WDP Scenario Gates & Completion Backstop - How the agent gates Autopilot/ESP-only machinery off on Windows Device Preparation sessions (deterministic ExecutionContext marker, fail-toward-Classic), which noise it suppresses (ZTD probe, esp_config unknown, ModernDeployment 100/417/418/1005, starved sweep), and the WDP completion model: High-confidence seed, desktop-based arm D, and the 30-min device_prep_completion backstop.
• Power-State Watcher - Live AC↔battery transitions and 50/30/15% downward battery-threshold crossings during enrollment via a WMI Win32_PowerManagementEvent push subscription (zero polling, never armed on battery-less devices): the power_state_change event (transition field, per-level lifetime latch, 5s debounce, emission cap) and the analyze rules ANALYZE-DEV-009 (battery <15%, high) / ANALYZE-DEV-010 (AC→battery, warning) with on_event interim triggers.
• System Timeline Watcher - Ground truth for two timeline blind spots from one System-channel EventLogWatcher with pre-agent backfill: system_clock_changed (Kernel-General 1 — oldTime/newTime/signed timeDeltaMs/reason/setting process; 2 s micro-slew floor, ≥5 min Warning+immediate) and system_sleep_episode (Power-Troubleshooter 1 sleep/hibernate + Kernel-Power 507 Modern Standby; authoritative enteredAt/exitedAt payload instants, 60 s Modern-Standby floor). Consumed by the TimeJumpBadge clock-set cause, the SessionInfoCard standby note, time-attribution SleepSpans (AttributionVersion 3) and ANALYZE-DEV-012.
• DO GroupId Auto-Set - EnableDoGroupIdAutoSet (ConfigVersion 40): the agent seeds the Delivery Optimization DOGroupId policy with a deterministic network-fingerprint GUID (default gateway IPv4 + SendARP MAC, RealmJoin-compatible byte layout) so same-network devices form one DO peering group during ESP; ownership-tracked via the StartupEventGate fingerprint, foreign DOGroupId/DOGroupIdSource policies always win, no random-GUID fallback.
• ESP Policy-Provider Stall Detection - The EnrollmentStatusTracking CSP's no-timeout Setup/Apps wait is keyed to the Intune-registered "Sidecar" provider by NAME: co-management's "ConfigMgr" parks the user ESP at "Apps (Identifying)" for days even with TrackingPoliciesCreated=1 (issue #106); the always-on two-arm esp_policy_provider_stalled tripwire (provider_incomplete | sidecar_provider_missing) and the SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Autopilot gather-rule allowlist entry that surface it.

Rules

• Gather Rule Phase Scoping, One-Shot Triggers & Emit-on-Change - Restricting gather rules to enrollment phases (activePhases / activeFromPhase sticky latch), one-shot collection at a phase's start/end (phase_change / phase_exit), and emitMode "on_change" result-dedup.
• Gather Rule Guardrails - Why the allowlists in rules/guardrails.json are enforced on the agent and nowhere else, which hard blocks survive unrestricted mode, and the rule that every collector must call a guard and emit security_warning on refusal.
• Rule Authoring Surface - How customer AIs author rules against the real contract: the baked MCP resources (guide/schemas/guardrails via combine.js), the MCP-local validate_rule pre-flight, and the side-effect-free POST rules/analyze/dryrun whose trace twin shares the production evaluators (parity + side-effect-freedom pinned by tests).
• Rule ID Namespace & Collision Guards - Why rule identity is the human-readable ruleId (no GUIDs) with tenant isolation via Table Storage partitioning, the reserved built-in namespace (RuleIdPolicy), which collisions are possible (custom-vs-custom across tenants: allowed and harmless), and the guards keeping the global RuleStats aggregate catalog-only and the global partition inside the reserved namespace (combine.js, reseed, cross-tenant RuleState GC).
• Analyze Rule Evaluation Triggers - Opt-in evaluateOn interim triggers (whiteglove_sealed, on_event:<type>) so rules can fire before a session is terminal, with RuleResults update-semantics (interim → finalize/resolve, NotifiedAt notification dedupe) replacing the permanent dedupe freeze, KO/stat suppression on interim runs, the ingest-side cached trigger registry, and the authoring lints that keep interim rules monotonic.

Backend

• Table Schema Sentinel - Startup no longer issues one CreateTableIfNotExists per table: a SHA-256 over TableNames.All in AdminConfiguration gates the full pass (derived, never hand-maintained), the SessionsIndex backfill runs only after a full pass behind a conditional-insert claim, and daily maintenance repairs out-of-band deletions.
• Business Timestamps - Why the Azure Tables system Timestamp is never authoritative (migrations reset it), and the OccurredUtc + RowKey-decode compensation for AuditLogs/OpsEvents/Events after the 2026-07-18 migration.
• Send-Time Frame Separation - One device-clock send timestamp per upload batch (X-Send-Time-Utc → SentAt on Events) splits ReceivedAt − OccurredUtc into pure spool delay and pure device-vs-server clock offset; the clock_skew condition measures SentAt batches directly (spool-immune), the CMTrace tripwire deliberately stays on its differential math.
• OOBE Bootstrap go-Code Flow - The bootstrap short-code lifecycle (portal-created session → irm go.autopilotmonitor.com/CODE | iex at Shift+F10 → GetBootstrapScriptFunction), the always-HTTP-200 text/plain contract, the two-line injection defense (GUID/URL/expiry validator + single-quoted PS literals, golden-pinned against the legacy TS template), and the per-IP rate-limit story behind Front Door.
• Silent-Session Classification - How a session whose agent went silent gets its honest status: the two-stage maintenance sweep (2h Stalled marker with the WhiteGlove Part-2 AwaitingUser gate and the self-deploying Succeeded gate, 5h timeout classification), the EnrollmentTimeoutClassifier rule order (explicit failure → WG Part 2 → self-deploying → completion evidence → emergency break → desktop+Hello → Device Setup/grace), the ingest paths sharing it (max-lifetime, late-telemetry heal, stall probe) and the admin retro-reconcile modes incl. self_deploying_silent.
• Device Journeys & First-Time-Right - How a device's terminal enrollment attempts are grouped into journeys (trim+casefold device key with junk-serial exclusion, first-success end, 30-day gap, WhiteGlove = one attempt), the DeviceHistories chain with its tombstone-driven deleted-session pruning, the additive daily FTR aggregates, and the banner/fleet/MCP surfaces.
• Enrollment Time Attribution - How a terminal session's authoritative wall clock (DurationSeconds, WhiteGlove pause excluded) is partitioned into named segments with an explicit unattributed remainder, ESP-blocking apps as positive evidence with "up to" what-if bounds, reboot spans from event gaps, and the breakdown/aggregate tables the sweep maintains.
• Attempt-Scoped App Install Durations - AppInstallSummary.DurationSeconds = status-defining (last) install attempt via the LastAttemptStartedAt max-fold anchor instead of the first-observation→last-terminal span that billed multi-pass IME gaps to trivial apps; InstallPassCount, the weaker-terminal guard, the radar's cutover gate, and time attribution's union-of-attempt-segments occupancy.
• Rule Regression Radar - How analyze-rule hit-rate regressions are detected (7-day window ≥2× the 28-day baseline with disjoint Wilson intervals), which suppressions keep the radar quiet (grace period, edit-in-window, kill switch), how alert episodes live in the ruleregression tracker keyspace with re-arm semantics, and the on-fire dimension correlation with its "correlated, not necessarily causal" wording contract.
• Verdict Calibration - How every session status write declares its VerdictPath (origin:detail vocabulary incl. classifier rule ids), how overriding a verdict preserves PriorStatus/PriorVerdictPath as the correction stream, the daily per-path calibration aggregate with the 7-day re-enrollment proxy and read-side legacy derivation, the GA endpoint / MCP tool / admin matrix, and the drift radar (share, silence-share, r6 evidence gap) with its operator-only ops events.
• App Version Duration Regression Radar - How app versions whose median install duration regressed vs. the previous version are detected (first-seen-ordered versions, median lift ≥2× plus a 5-minute absolute floor over measured installs only), how alert episodes live in the appversionregression tracker keyspace with drain/median re-arm semantics, and the bell/ops-event/analytics surfaces.
• Plan Downgrade Policy & the Retention Grace Period - What happens when a tenant loses Pro: every entitlement gates read-time and reversibly ("gate, don't destroy"), except retention — a 30-day grace keeps the Pro cap before the Community cap starts hard-deleting; the ProDowngradedUtc/trial-expiry anchor model, the TenantPlanDowngraded/RetentionGrace* ops events, and the deliberate non-grace of everything else.
• Tenant Activation & the Once-Only Welcome Mail - How a signup becomes an activated tenant (manual approve or the auto-approve queue), and the write-then-read + conditional-marker arbitration that sends the welcome mail exactly once even though activation and the user-typed notification address race each other.
• W365 Cloud PC Device Validation - Why Cloud PCs can never pass the Autopilot serial lookup, and the cert-CN-bound CloudPc fallback validator: Subject CN (= Intune device id) matched against the tenant's Graph virtualEndpoint/cloudPCs inventory — admits exactly the service-provisioned Cloud PCs, nothing else.
• ServerActions & On-Demand Diagnostics - The queue-on-session, deliver-on-ingest action channel, the TenantAdminOrOperator tier with in-function per-type re-gating, the portal's Collect Logs flow (quick-config orders rotate_config before request_diagnostics), and the hosted-prefix sweep in the offboarding cascade.
• Session Annotations - Role-separated human verdicts on sessions (operator / tenantadmin / globaladmin lanes, one row each): the per-lane write matrix with own-tenant binding, the platform-internal GA lane, the fired-rule-id snapshot that makes annotations rule-quality labels, and the portal card + MCP list/annotate surfaces.
• Lifecycle Manifests & Session Scope Resolution - The fragility-audit P5/P6 completeness nets: every table classified into a deletion lifecycle (offboarding buckets incl. the RowKey-anchored SafeWipe Variant D, per-session cascade, kept-by-design), the SessionsIndex field manifest with bidirectional builder/reader pinning, the single ResolveSessionScopeAsync helper backed by the SessionTenantLookup point-read, and the server-side dashboard free-text search (q=) with its page-backfill loop.

MCP Server

• MCP Docs Corpus - How the published customer documentation becomes the search_docs corpus: CRLF-safe heading chunking, build-time embedding as a third precomputed section, and why a docs edit needs an MCP redeploy.
• MCP Tool Telemetry - The three telemetry layers for judging tool quality: backend App Insights via X-MCP-Tool-Name, the per-user usage table, and the MCP_TOOL_LOGGING stderr lines (soft errors, result size vs. cap, zero-hit searches, Zod rejections).

Web Portal

• Portal Navigation Prefetch & the SWA Runtime Bottleneck - Why every navigation Link sets prefetch={false}: the App Router's viewport prefetch fans out one RSC request per visible link and the Static Web Apps SSR runtime queues them server-side into a multi-minute tail. Records the follow-up measurement (the Standard plan changed nothing; the prefetch storm was an accidental keep-alive), where browser telemetry actually lives, and why this curl build cannot be trusted for HTTP versions.

Security & Identity

• MCP OAuth Flow - Who authenticates where when connecting an AI client to the MCP server; two identities, three parties plus Entra ID.

Conventions for this bundle

• Every concept document is a markdown file with YAML frontmatter; type is mandatory, title, description, resource, tags, and timestamp are recommended.
• Use standard relative markdown links between documents (e.g. agent/overview.md, ../architecture.md). Do NOT use the spec's /-prefixed bundle-absolute form — GitHub resolves those against the repo root (missing /docs) and navigation breaks.
• Record notable additions and changes in log.md.
• index.md and log.md are reserved names — never use them for concept documents.