Every fact inside CrossConnect makes the same journey: it enters from the network or your keyboard, gets staged as an observation, is confidence-scored before it is trusted, becomes part of the source of truth, is computed on, and finally leaves as a cited answer or an alert. Here is that journey, drawn out end to end, with no packet ever captured.
Whether a fact arrives over SNMP or is typed in by an operator, it passes through the same six stages. Each stage has one job, and the boundary between them is where trust is earned.
Data arrives many ways. The platform reads switch-derived signals, listens for the announcements AV gear already broadcasts, accepts traffic summaries, and takes what operators type in. It never captures a packet or inspects a payload, it reads state the network already exposes.
The scheduled discovery worker polls each device for its interfaces, neighbors, serial, sensors, and more. The backbone of how the network is found.
Routers export traffic summaries to the built-in receiver, decoded into who-talked-to-whom, with no packet payloads ever read.
Joins the multicast group and hears the service announcements AV gear already broadcasts (Dante, NDI, AirPlay), the strongest signal for typing AV endpoints.
Reads the option-55/60 fingerprint from relayed DHCP requests to recognize a device family, corroborating AV classification.
Devices push real-time events (link down, PSU fail, lamp hours). Each becomes a confidence-scored observation for review.
Operators document gear through the UI or REST, and external systems push assertions to the inbound event API. Both are stamped with who and when.
Raw observations land in append-only staging tables, one family per kind of fact. Nothing here is treated as truth. Each row carries when it was seen, the newest one per natural key is the operative one, and old rows are purged automatically. This is the platform's short-term memory of reality.
A new sweep does not overwrite the last one, it adds rows. That history is what powers the operator-facing “what changed since we last looked” view, and the audit trail behind it.
A daily sweep drops observations past the retention window (14 days by default), so staging stays a rolling picture of recent reality rather than an ever-growing log.
A staged observation is not trusted just because it was seen. CrossConnect scores how believable it is by how well it corroborates across sources, labels it with that confidence, and only then commits it to the source of truth. Nothing is ever invented, and a value the platform is unsure of stays visibly flagged.
Believability is earned by corroboration: agreement across sources lifts an observation toward Confirmed; isolation keeps it low and visible.
Where the platform is unsure, it labels the value Inferred or Unconfirmed and shows the next check, rather than presenting a guess as a fact.
Every fact that enters the source of truth is written through the audit chain, so what changed, when, and from which observation can always be traced.
Once validated, a fact becomes part of the canonical model: devices, interfaces, cables, addresses, circuits, and the services they deliver. And every change to that model is written into a tamper-evident, hash-linked chain, so who changed what, and in what order, can always be proven.
The intelligence layers do not store new facts, they compute from the source of truth. Each reads a snapshot and returns a score or a ranked list as a pure function, which is why the same evidence can power data quality, compliance, maturity, and the “what should I fix first” queue all at once.
At the end of the journey, data becomes an answer. The assistant replies in plain language with the records it used. Webhooks and SIEM sinks carry changes to your other tools. Reports and the API export the model. And every screen reads the same single source of truth.
CrossConnect treats every fact as an observation until it earns confidence, records the moment it becomes trusted, and computes everything else from that one trustworthy model, so the answer you get at the end is one you can check all the way back to the wire.
