Hi

While reviewing the project in light of the BAM rename, we also considered the relationship between Overlord and more traditional management capabilities, such as RHQ, to identify where one solution may be more appropriate than the other. The answer we came up with was Business Level Agreements vs Service Level Agreements.

Service Level Agreements:

These tend to refer to metrics associated with a particular service, with the agreement specifying performance and availability criteria. The data is independent of the business transactions that have been performed using the service.

This is a perfect example of where a traditional management product should be used, as the SLAs can be evaluated against summary information collected from the service.

Business Level Agreements:

Business level agreements  relate to specific criteria associated with individual end-users or organizations. The policy enforcement example, distributed with the project, could be viewed as such an agreement, where a business user must not exceed their credit limit, otherwise they will be prevented from purchasing any more items. Another such example could be based on throttling, where a particular user can only perform a certain number of requests within a specified time limit.

So where the agreement requires stateful information to be maintained on behalf of the particular user, then the Overlord runtime governance capabilities may be more appropriate.

However in cases where a management capability is not available to monitor SLAs, the Overlord runtime governance capabilities could also be used for assessing service performance - however there is higher overhead for using Overlord for this functionality, and it may not be possible to assess service availability (unless the information is provided by a separate source).

Regards

Gary