Dictionary

Spider uses the following semantic to describe its components and managed entities:

System components or entities

Name	Description
Back end	The microservices of Spider responsible for configuration, parsing, monitoring and exposure of data.
Central system	Floocus own back office (the Floocus Portal) used for central features: plugins, surveys, licenses, and - of course - invoicing.
Controller	A Kubernetes Controller used to deploy / attach Whisperers remotely on any Kubernetes workload. It also monitors all agents running in the cluster and can retrieve their logs.
Whisperer	Spider agents responsible to capture the communications. Called sometimes Gossiper for the Go release.
Gocipher	Spider agents responsible to capture the TLS secrets.
Attachment	The request to attach a Whisperer to a Kubernetes Workload.
Team	A group of users sharing access to the same Whisperers, and sharing UI configuration for these.
User	You, using Spider

Communication entities

Name	Description
Packets	IP network packets. The lowest unit of packet capture.
TCP sessions	A set of packets that forms a TCP sessions with a client, a server, a duration etc. Most used protocol for data transport on internet.
TLS secret	A set of secrets and cipher identification that describes how a TCP sessions was enciphered on the network.
Parsing log	An internal object used to track the parsing progress of a TCP session.
Communications	A decoded application-level exchange (request / response or message) reassembled from packets over a TCP session. Spider decodes HTTP, gRPC, PostgreSQL, Redis and Kafka.
Network usage	Aggregated statistics (every min) of network exchanges inside a Kubernetes cluster.

UI Features

Name	Description
Filters	Search criteria, applied when fetching data from the server, allowing you to dynamically focus on the data you want to see.
Query	Set of filters, combined. That may be saved and reloaded.
Timeline	The timeline is the dynamic histogram allowing to browse and select the time frame of data to analyse.
Dashboard	Component displaying a set of Widgets showing aggregated information of the selected time. Widgets allow drill down on the data.
Map	Component displaying a summary of communications as a network map with clients and servers as nodes, and communication channels as links.
Grid	Component displaying communications in a table with filtering, sorting etc.
Sequence diagram	Component displaying the sequence of communications in a dynamic UML sequence diagram.
Stats	Component displaying aggregated statistics of the selected communications.
Detail panel	Component displaying details on any selected communication or configuration entity.
View	Current communication entities / protocol viewed on the UI: HTTP, TCP, Packet...
Mode	Current component active in the UI: top and bottom panel.
Link	A link is a saved state of the UI that you may share with others so they see what you see.
Public Link	A link that may be accessed by people without a Spider account.
Plugins	Spider supports UI plugins in Javascript packages, to enhance the integration experience with your systems.
Tag	A business value Spider extracts from inside a decoded payload (e.g. an order id, a customer, a country), usable for search and correlation. No instrumentation - extraction only.
Correlation id	An extracted identifier that links related calls together across services and protocols, so one exchange can be followed end to end.
Transcoding	Rendering a binary payload (e.g. gRPC protobuf) as readable JSON.
Waterfall	Component displaying communications as timeline bars, with lane grouping to reveal concurrency.