What is Spotlight federation? (4223578)

As of version 11.6, Spotlight Client can now monitor connections from many Spotlight Diagnostic Servers in a federation. Spotlight Clients in the federation share the same custom views, templates, alarm actions and list of planned outages.

The standard Spotlight configuration has one Spotlight Diagnostic Server. All connections are monitored through the Spotlight Diagnostic Server. More than one Spotlight Diagnostic Servers may be required when:

• The number of connections to monitor exceeds the design of one Spotlight Diagnostic Server. A single Spotlight Diagnostic Server is designed to monitor a maximum of 100 SQL Servers, Analysis Services or Replication instances and 100 Windows servers.
• Organization is suited to the deployment of geographic hubs, where each geographic region deploys its own Spotlight Diagnostic Server. Multiple Spotlight Diagnostic Server are deployed separately or as a federation.

Separate Spotlight deployments:
A Spotlight Client monitors connections from one Spotlight Diagnostic Server at a time. The deployments do not share custom views, templates and alarm actions.

Spotlight federation:
A Spotlight Client monitors connections from all Spotlight Diagnostic Server in the federation. Spotlight Clients in the federation share the same custom views, templates, alarm actions and list of planned outages.

See Spotlight Federation article for complete list of steps

For additional information, refer to the Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise Federation Guide. Click here.