Guarded support workflow

AV Scout

Give an AV support team fast endpoint evidence and a narrowly scoped recovery action—without handing out unrestricted switch access.

Active developmentFastAPI · WebSockets · Cisco IOSDesigned + built by Edmund Dionisio

01 / Problem

The support team needed evidence, not a privileged CLI.

The AV team needed a way to locate and recover its own devices without waiting for a network engineer to repeat every lookup. The challenge was giving them useful self-service on their approved VLAN while keeping broad switch access and unrelated infrastructure completely outside the workflow.

AV Scout exposes a deliberately small workflow. Search by MAC, IP, building, or room; review the live interface record; and allow a bounded port power cycle only when server-side policy confirms the target.

The design question

I treated refusal as part of the product. The tool should explain why an action is blocked—wrong scope, trunk mode, protected neighbor, stale evidence, or cooldown—so self-service never becomes guesswork.

LocateMAC, IP, building, and room-oriented search

ExplainVLAN, link, counters, and authentication state

ConstrainOne approved recovery action behind live policy

02 / Workflow

Search first. Prove scope. Then act.

Start from the support context

Normalize a MAC or IP, or narrow discovery by a synthetic building and room scope.

Trace to the access edge

Follow network evidence through the approved jump path to a candidate switch port.

Build the evidence card

Display link state, VLAN, mode, NAC session, counters, reachability, and protection signals.

Evaluate the action

Require the approved AV scope, access-port mode, no uplink or port-channel signal, confirmation, and cooldown.

Record the outcome

Stream progress, restore the port, and retain the operator, target, timing, and result.

03 / Safety model

The UI is narrow; the server enforcement is narrower.

Approved VLAN scopeWrite action requires live evidence from the designated AV access scope.

Protected interfacesTrunks, uplinks, and port-channels are rejected.

Command allowlistNo arbitrary CLI string can be submitted from the browser.

Explicit confirmationThe operator must acknowledge the exact recovery action.

CooldownRepeat actions on the same target are rate-limited.

Activity historyActor, target, decision, and result are retained.

Public-language boundary

The tool does not make broad claims that it “cannot touch” anything else. The precise statement is that server-side validation restricts the exposed write action to interfaces that pass the implemented policy.

04 / Evidence

Operators see why an action is available or blocked.

Sanitized AV Scout device result and interface evidence — The result card brings identity, port, VLAN, status, and policy context together.

Sanitized AV Scout activity log — Activity history preserves the operator and result of scoped recovery work.

05 / Lessons

Self-service works when refusal is understandable.

A safe workflow cannot end at “blocked.” It needs to show which evidence failed—wrong scope, trunk mode, protected neighbor, stale lookup, active cooldown—so the operator knows whether to refresh, escalate, or stop.

Production use requires authorized device access and an organization-approved target policy.
The public case study uses synthetic identifiers and exposes no live SSH capability.
Version references in older documentation conflict, so this page reports maturity without a public version claim.