Implementation Guide › Creating Federations › Hierarchical Federations

Hierarchical Federations

Hierarchical federations use a top-down, pyramid structure to spread event collection loads over a wide area. The structure is similar to an organization chart. There is no set number of levels that you have to create - you can create the levels that make the most sense for your business needs.

In a hierarchical federation, you can connect to any CA User Activity Reporting Module server to see reports on its event data and data from any of the child servers beneath it. The scope of the data that you can access is limited by where you start in the hierarchy. If you start in the middle of the hierarchy, you can see only that server's data, and any of its child server's data. The higher up you move in a hierarchical federation, the wider the scope of network data you have. At the top level, you have access to all of the data in the whole deployment.

Hierarchical federations are useful, for example, in regional deployments. Suppose that you want local resources to have access to event data within a certain hierarchy, or branch, of the network, but not the event data in other, parallel branches. You could create a hierarchical federation with two or more parallel branches to contain the data for each region. Each of the branches could report to a management CA User Activity Reporting Module server at the headquarters office for the top-down view of all event log reports.