The InCommon Metadata Distribution Service (MDQ Service) facilitates secure and trusted exchange of critical organizational identity, service location/capability, and contact information among identity providers and service providers.

Find and retrieve metadata for identity providers and service providers in InCommon and R&E federations around the world using the InCommon Metadata Distribution Service.

Working with the metadata service

Introducing per-entity metadata service

Production environment

Configure your software to use InCommon metadata in production.

Preview environment

The "preview" MDQ Service environment allows you to validate your service against upcoming changes to the MDQ Service.

Preview environment status: the preview environment current mirrors the production environment.

References

Find out the latest features and changes to the MDQ Service.

Happenings

Want to see how adopting the MDQ metadata service affects your system's performance?

Here is an in-use memory graph at the moment a university switched to using MDQ in its production IDP servers:

Great results from a Service Provider:
"We were able to switch to using MDQ. The service restarts in 5 seconds now versus 15 minutes."

Service Level Objectives

The production endpoints of this service are designed to meet the following requirements on a best-effort basis:

99.9% availability
<= 200ms per request from clients on the Internet2 network
Metadata validity window of no less than 5 business days (metadata is valid for 14 days, but may be signed infrequently over extended holiday periods)
You can see the status of InCommon services on our status dashboard

It's worth noting that since launch, both the technology preview and production environments have had 100% availability.

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Metadata Distribution Service Documentation