It is common to have testing, staging and production environments that are isolated from each other and therefore not managed by a single RHQ instance. The RHQ servers managing the individual environments share a lot of configuration (not only the settings, but also metric and alert templates, etc.) and so it would be good to have a feature that would help the administrators keep these distinct RHQ servers "in sync" configuration-wise. The design and features as they evolve are captured on the RHQ wiki: http://wiki.rhq-project.org/display/RHQ/Design+-+Configuration+synchronization
The first incarnation of the configuration synchronization has been implemented. Future enhancements will be tracked separately.