What is VMS federation and why does it matter?

Federation lets multiple independent Visylix VMS instances appear as one to the operator. You search across every site from a single box, live-view any camera from any site in one click, and receive events from every peer in one unified feed, but video stays at the source. No central archive, no bandwidth mega-pipe, no single point of failure.

How does scatter/gather search work?

When an operator runs a query, "find all red cars between 2 and 4 PM yesterday across every site", Visylix scatters the request to every registered peer in parallel. Each peer executes the search locally against its own cameras and database, returns matching clips and metadata, and Visylix gathers results into a unified feed ranked by timestamp or relevance. 10 sites respond in the time of the slowest one, not the sum of all.

How is peer-to-peer traffic authenticated?

Each federated peer gets a unique HMAC-SHA256 signing secret. Every federation request is signed with a timestamp + nonce + HMAC. Peers reject expired signatures (5-minute window), replay attempts, and unknown signers. You can rotate per-peer secrets without downtime via the admin console, the rotating peer accepts both old and new secrets for a configurable grace period.

Can operators watch live video from a remote site?

Yes. Federated live view uses signed WebRTC URLs. Operator clicks a remote camera, Visylix mints a short-lived (60-second) signed URL at the owning peer, and the browser establishes a direct WebRTC session to that peer's engine. Video never round-trips through the federation coordinator, it flows directly from the source site to the operator's browser over TURN relay.

How do you handle a peer being offline?

Every peer is health-checked every 30 seconds. Unreachable peers are flagged in the admin UI and skipped in scatter/gather queries, with a clear "3 of 12 peers did not respond" banner on the result. Events from reconnecting peers are back-filled into the event feed when they come back online, so operators never miss a historical event just because a WAN link flapped.

Available on Scale and Enterprise

Every site. One operator. No central archive.

Federate Visylix VMS instances across sites, regions, and countries. Scatter/gather search, federated live view with signed WebRTC URLs, per-peer HMAC secrets, and video stays where it was captured.

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Store NYC

Warehouse NJ

Store LA

DC London

Plant Munich

Each site = one Visylix VMS. Federation turns N instances into one operator experience.

Federation is how you scale without centralizing.

Central archives fail at bandwidth, cost, and compliance. Federation solves the operator UX without the architectural penalty.

One pane of glass without the central archive

Traditional multi-site VMS ships every frame from every site to one "master" server. That breaks at bandwidth, cost, and regulatory limits (GDPR data residency, cross-border video restrictions). Visylix Federation gives operators the unified experience without the centralization cost.

Investigations in minutes, not days

Hunting a vehicle of interest across 50 store locations used to mean logging into 50 different consoles. With federation, an operator runs one search and gets every hit, ranked, in one feed. Case resolution times drop dramatically.

Zero-trust peer model

Each peer is a full peer, not a client. HMAC-signed requests, per-peer secrets, replay-protected. A compromised peer can only impersonate itself, it cannot forge queries "from" other peers or exfiltrate video from sites it has no signed access to.

Federation primitives that actually work.

Scatter, gather, authenticate, heal, observe. Built for WAN-connected surveillance, not for a demo on one laptop.

Scatter/gather search

Query once, every site responds in parallel. Search "red sedan, 2-4 PM yesterday" across 30 sites in the time of the slowest one, not the sum of all. Results merge into one unified feed.

Federated live view

Click a camera at any remote site. A 60-second signed WebRTC URL is minted at the owning peer. Browser connects directly to the source engine, no round-trip through a central proxy.

Per-peer HMAC secrets

Every peer has a unique HMAC-SHA256 signing secret. Requests are signed with timestamp + nonce. Replay protection via 5-minute window. Hot-rotate secrets with a grace period, no downtime.

Health checks

Peer status polled every 30 seconds. Unreachable peers skipped in scatter queries with a clear "3 of 12 peers did not respond" banner. Back-fill events on reconnect so no history is lost.

Site labels + metadata

Every camera, event, and clip is tagged with its originating site. Color-coded per peer in the unified feed. Filter scatter queries by site, region, or custom tags like "retail stores" vs "warehouses".

Video stays at the source

Federation moves metadata, not video. No central archive, no bandwidth mega-pipe, no single point of failure. Compliance-friendly: data sovereignty preserved per site.

Standing up a federation.

Four steps, no mesh configuration, no central coordinator required.

Register each peer

Admin adds each Visylix instance as a peer. Generates an HMAC secret, records the peer's public URL and site label. One-click registration from either side.

Verify connectivity

Federation runs a signed handshake in both directions. Shows round-trip latency, TLS fingerprint, engine version. Green means peer is trusted and reachable.

Configure scope

Which peers share events? Which share cameras for live view? Which participate in scatter search? Fine-grained per-pair permissions, not all-or-nothing.

Operators just work

Every site's cameras, events, and clips appear in the unified view. Search box scatters across the scope you configured. No new UI to learn.

Use case, Retail chain

“We federated 94 stores. Loss prevention now runs one query across the whole estate and sees every hit in 15 seconds. The corporate network never moves a single video frame, every clip stays at the store it was captured.”

Multi-region retail chain, 94 stores across 3 countries. GDPR data-residency constraints prevented central archival. Visylix Federation delivered unified operations without the compliance headache.

Stop hunting through 50 consoles.

Federation is included on Scale and Enterprise. Start a trial and federate your first two sites in under 20 minutes.

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