RuntimeHQ Glossary

Application

A deployable software system that consumes operational state from RuntimeHQ. An organization may connect one or more customer-facing or internal applications to the same RuntimeHQ account.

Capability

A user-defined functional area within an application that can independently respond to operational state changes.

Examples:

Search
AI Assistant
Payments
Checkout
Recommendations
Chat

Capabilities are defined by the application team and are unique to each application.

Operational State

The declared operational condition of an application capability that determines how applications should behave during outages, degraded service, or maintenance.

Examples:

Operational
Degraded
Outage
Maintenance

Applications consume operational state to determine how they should behave.

Operational State Management

The discipline of coordinating customer-facing application behavior during operational events such as outages, degraded service, and maintenance windows.

Unlike incident management, Operational State Management focuses on how applications respond, not how incidents are resolved.

Operational State Control Plane

A centralized system responsible for distributing operational state to connected applications.

RuntimeHQ is an Operational State Control Plane.

Incident

An operational event that changes the availability or quality of one or more capabilities.

Examples include:

Service outage
Partial degradation
Third-party dependency failure
Scheduled maintenance

Operational Event

Any event that affects application behavior.

Examples:

Incident
Maintenance window
Regional outage
External dependency failure

Outage

An operational state indicating that a capability is unavailable.

Applications decide how to respond—for example:

Hide the capability
Disable interaction
Redirect users
Display a maintenance experience

Degraded Service

An operational state indicating that a capability remains available but performance or reliability is reduced.

Applications may:

Show warning indicators
Display advisory messages
Increase request timeouts
Disable optional functionality

Maintenance

An operational state indicating planned work that temporarily affects application capabilities.

Unlike an outage, maintenance is typically scheduled in advance.

Scheduled Maintenance Window

A predefined time period during which RuntimeHQ automatically activates a Maintenance state.

Target Scope

The portion of an application affected by an operational state.

Examples:

Entire application
Search capability
Checkout capability
AI Assistant
Specific route
Specific feature

Target scopes are defined by the application.

Customer Message

Human-readable text distributed alongside operational state to explain the current condition of a capability.

Example:

AI Assistant responses may be delayed while we investigate a performance issue.

Runtime Parameters

Additional metadata distributed with operational state.

Examples:

Customer messages
Estimated recovery time
Incident reference
Retry intervals

SDK

The RuntimeHQ client library integrated into an application.

Responsibilities include:

Polling operational state
Caching responses
Exposing state APIs
Remaining outside the request path

Background Polling

A lightweight synchronization mechanism where SDKs periodically refresh operational state without affecting application requests.

RuntimeHQ intentionally uses background polling instead of persistent streaming protocols to maximize operational reliability.

Edge Cache

Globally distributed cache used to serve operational state with minimal latency.

RuntimeHQ serves state from edge locations with a short stale-while-revalidate policy.

Stale-While-Revalidate (SWR)

A caching strategy where cached operational state can be served immediately while a fresh copy is retrieved in the background.

This minimizes latency while keeping state current.

Customer Experience During Incidents

The way an application communicates operational conditions to end users.

Examples:

Warning banner
Disabled button
Read-only mode
Maintenance page
Informational tooltip

RuntimeHQ coordinates the operational state that enables these experiences.

Graceful Degradation

A design pattern where an application continues functioning by limiting or modifying affected capabilities instead of failing entirely.

Operational Readiness

The ability of an engineering organization to safely communicate and coordinate operational state across applications during incidents.

Incident Commander

The person responsible for coordinating an operational incident.

RuntimeHQ provides Incident Commanders with centralized operational visibility but does not replace incident management workflows.

Multi-Application Coordination

Synchronizing operational state across multiple applications from a single source of truth.

For example:

Customer web app
Mobile app
Admin portal
Support dashboard

Environment

A deployment stage associated with an application.

Examples:

Production
Staging
Development
QA

Operational states can be scoped to specific environments.

Source of Truth

The authoritative location where operational state is declared and maintained.

RuntimeHQ acts as the operational source of truth for connected applications.

Observability

The practice of understanding system health through metrics, logs, traces, and telemetry.

Observability detects problems.

RuntimeHQ coordinates application behavior after problems are identified.

Incident Management

The operational process of detecting, coordinating, communicating, and resolving production incidents.

RuntimeHQ complements Incident Management by distributing operational state to applications.

Monitoring

Continuous collection of system health information used to detect failures or performance degradation.

Monitoring tells teams something is wrong.

Feature Flag

A software delivery mechanism used to control feature availability, experimentation, or progressive rollouts.

Feature Flags answer:

Who should receive a feature?

RuntimeHQ answers:

How should applications behave during operational events?

Service Status Page

A public webpage communicating overall platform availability.

Status pages communicate service health to users.

RuntimeHQ enables applications themselves to react to operational state.

Circuit Breaker

A resilience pattern that prevents repeated requests to failing dependencies.

Circuit breakers protect backend systems.

RuntimeHQ coordinates frontend and application behavior.

Failover

Automatically switching to an alternative system after a failure.

Failover maintains service continuity but does not define customer-facing application behavior.

Control Plane

A centralized system responsible for configuring or coordinating distributed components.

RuntimeHQ is an Operational State Control Plane.

Data Plane

The execution layer responsible for serving user requests.

RuntimeHQ intentionally remains outside the application's request path.

The request path (or critical path) is the sequence of synchronous operations required to fulfill a user's request. Every step in this path adds latency, and every external dependency introduced into this path represents a potential single point of failure.

RuntimeHQ Terms

RuntimeHQ

An Operational State Control Plane that distributes customer-facing operational state across applications during outages, degraded service, and maintenance windows.

RuntimeHQ Console

The administrative interface used to manage applications, capabilities, incidents, maintenance windows, and operational state.

RuntimeHQ SDK

The client library responsible for synchronizing operational state with applications while remaining outside the request path.

Design Partner

An early engineering organization collaborating with RuntimeHQ to validate product direction, architecture, and operational workflows before general availability.

Operational Timeline

A chronological view of all operational events affecting applications and capabilities over time.

An Operational Timeline provides a complete history of incident creation, state transitions, maintenance windows, and recovery events, helping engineering teams understand what changed, when it changed, and how applications were impacted.

Unlike an Audit Log, an Operational Timeline focuses on the lifecycle of operational events, making it useful for incident reviews, postmortems, and understanding customer-facing operational history.

Audit Log

A tamper-evident record of administrative actions performed within RuntimeHQ.

Audit Logs capture who performed an action, what changed, and when the change occurred.

Examples include:

Incident created
Operational state changed
Customer message updated
Capability added or removed
Maintenance window modified
User permissions updated

Audit Logs provide accountability, compliance, and traceability for operational changes.

Operational Notes

Structured notes attached to an incident or operational event to capture context beyond the operational state itself.

Operational Notes help Incident Commanders and engineering teams document investigation progress, decisions, workarounds, recovery updates, or internal observations throughout the lifecycle of an incident.

Unlike Customer Messages, Operational Notes are intended for internal teams and are never propagated to applications or end users.

Examples include:

Suspected database connection pool exhaustion.
Temporary workaround applied to API Gateway.
Vendor escalation opened with payment provider.
Root cause confirmed. Recovery in progress.

Control Plane

The administrative and configuration environment of RuntimeHQ where all mutation actions occur. This includes defining applications and their capabilities, creating incidents, managing the incident lifecycle, and scheduling maintenance windows. It is accessed via the Console UI or the Control Plane API.

Runtime Plane

The read-only distribution infrastructure of RuntimeHQ responsible for delivering the computed, effective operational state to applications. It consists of a globally distributed, low-latency API consumed by the Runtime SDKs and end-user applications to ensure high-availability degradation.

Runtime State

The SDK periodically synchronizes Operational State and makes it available as Runtime State locally inside the application. It is the locally available representation of Operational State exposed by the RuntimeHQ SDK for application logic.

Think of the hierarchy like this:

RuntimeHQ distributes ➡ Operational State
The SDK exposes ➡ Runtime State
Applications consume ➡ Runtime State
to react to ➡ Operational State

Example Flow:

Glossary

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