Why XAV Becomes Your Richest Source of Historical Endpoint Data
Beyond coverage verification — toward a living, historical inventory.
Most IT and security teams think of Cross-Agent Verification (XAV) as a way to see what’s missing — to catch endpoints where critical agents have gone dark, fallen out of compliance, or failed to check in. But in practice, XAV evolves into something much deeper: a historical record of every agent, every device, and every state those devices have ever reported.
Over time, that history becomes one of the richest datasets you’ll ever have on your environment.
Every Agent Leaves Clues
Each platform you integrate — your RMM, XDR, MDM, DNS filter, patching tool, remote control client — contributes small pieces of telemetry. Individually, that data is limited.
But when aggregated through XAV, they form a time-series of state changes for each device across every agent platform it’s ever touched.
That means you can start asking questions your existing systems can’t answer:
- When was this device last seen by any agent?
- How has its OS version changed over time?
- Which agents tend to fall out of sync together?
- Who was the last logged-in user before a coverage gap appeared?
These insights stop being hypothetical when XAV correlates device identity across data sources — a single entity graph connecting all the places that “device” exists.
From Assurance Layer to Living Inventory
Because XAV continuously ingests telemetry, it naturally builds an inventory layer that reflects reality, not configuration intent.
Most inventories live inside your RMM or MDM, which are built for enforcement — not historical accuracy. They overwrite data as it changes. XAV, by contrast, never forgets.
It keeps a continuous record of:
- OS version and patch level
- Agent installation and removal events
- Last check-in times for each agent
- Logged-in user history
- IP and network context
- Compliance or health status per integration
This makes XAV a sort of historical truth database — one that tells you not just what exists now, but how it got there.
Why That Matters
When an incident happens — a breach, a misconfiguration, a compliance audit — historical context becomes gold.
You don’t just need to know that an endpoint was missing its XDR agent; you need to know when it disappeared, which version it last ran, and who was logged in at the time.
That timeline often doesn’t exist anywhere else, because most management systems discard old telemetry once it’s replaced.
XAV preserves that chain of evidence.
The result is a system that doubles as a lightweight forensic inventory, useful not only for day-to-day coverage assurance but also for:
- Post-incident investigations
- Compliance verification (e.g., demonstrating coverage continuity)
- Lifecycle management and decommissioning
- Environment drift detection
- Historical baselining for patch or OS adoption rates
The Bigger Picture
Cross-Agent Verification started as a way to solve a simple, painful problem: “How do I know all my devices actually have the right agents running?”
But the more integrations you add, the more XAV becomes your single, historical lens into everything those agents know about your fleet.
Robert Katic - Founder, Fieldmark.io