Unit 01 — Endpoint Management
Relay runs on one idea: capture state before acting, act, capture state after, compare, and roll back if something drifted. A person gets involved when something needs a decision, not to click approve seventeen times. That discipline covers patching, monitoring, privileged access, discovery, and security detection, on one endpoint model spanning servers, workstations, and the ruggedized devices on warehouse and shop floors.
The patch engine runs a real state machine: preflight checks, VM snapshots for VMware guests, pre-download, staged install through apt, dnf, yum, or the Windows Update API, post-flight state comparison, and rollback when the diff says something is wrong. Maintenance windows, recurring schedules, and ring-based rollout are first-class, not scripts. The 30 to 60 minutes of human verification per server that started this company is the machine's job now.
Alerts and incidents share one model, so triage happens once. Alert rules and templates, notification routing, a NOC dashboard, application and metric monitors, forecasting, and dependency-aware suppression cover the monitoring side. On the security side: vulnerability management with exploit enrichment and per-endpoint exploitability, fingerprint drift detection against a known-good catalog, ransomware detection, exfiltration detection with scoring, and certificate lifecycle management with auto-renewal.
PAM is zero-knowledge: credentials sit in a vault under envelope encryption, sessions are brokered, and vault access is audited, so nobody, including the operator, needs to know the credential. Remote desktop, terminal, and file browser sessions run through the agent tunnel with session recording, so every privileged action has an answer. Approval workflows gate the actions that should not happen unilaterally.
Network discovery and SNMP topology crawling over LLDP, CDP, and routing protocols build an infrastructure map alongside dynamic endpoint groups. The infrastructure bridge reaches hypervisor and cloud control planes. Active Directory management covers forest inventory, stale-account policies, replication health, GPO baseline and drift detection, and AD backup. Workflow automation, runbooks, scripts, and a marketplace round out the execution layer.
Relay's beta program is a long-running trial by design: patching cycles, monitoring baselines, and privileged access prove themselves over months of operation, not in a demo. Trials include Portal as the identity layer, and the Beacon bridge can be enabled when the service desk enters scope.