Federation is a Foglight® feature that addresses the needs of customers who monitor large-scale environments that are naturally partitioned into logical units. Each partition is traditionally served by one Foglight Management Server instance and its distributed clients/agents.
Federation enables the use of one Foglight® Management Server to operate, while using other Management Servers as the data source. As illustrated in the following figure, a Foglight user can visualize the data from one or more stand-alone Management Servers (the Federated Children) from a single, central Management Server (the Federation Master). This allows users to meet both local and central monitoring requirements.
Federation should be used to address the following customer environment issues:
Federation Masters have the following capabilities:
| • | Unifying and periodically synchronizing the model between more than one Foglight® Management Server. | 
The federation feature allows users to:
| • | Go to the Alarms Viewer and see all current alarms that are reported by any Federated Child. | 
| IMPORTANT: In Foglight 5.7.x, users can control the alarms’ refresh period by setting the MaxAlarmUpdateDelay parameter in the federation.config file. For more information, see Alarm service communication channel. | 
Foglight® 5.9.x has the following known issues with respect to federation:
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