Agility 3.0 is a complete platform to manage Policies and Service Agreements. Policies can be rapidly created using the user friendly Policy API, deployed to live Agility Servers and managed through the Agility Portal. The Agility Portal also allows easy management of Service Agreements, including their creation, modification and termination. There is a full audit available of all events associated with Service Agreements, viewable through the Agility Portal.
Through the Agility Portal it is easy to manage all aspects of the Agility Server. Service Agreements are located and viewed through a user friendly interface, and may also be searched extensively. Creating, modifying and terminating Service Agreements is easily done through the edit interface. Managing registered Policies can be done at runtime through the policy management interface. There are also a number of other features available; viewing audit information, live information about proposals, managing server configuration, and more.
Both the Agility Server and the Agility Portal can be deployed to any Java EE 6 compatible application server. This makes it very easy to integrate Policy with existing applications, databases and services. In fact, Policies are just standard session beans which makes it very easy for Java EE developers to start writing and deploying Policy to the application server of their choice.
A lot of work has gone into designing an API that allows rapid development of Policy, with the minimum learning curve. The Policy API allows developers to write Policies that handles events associated with Service Agreements, for example validating the proposed modification to an existing Service Agreement against organizational policies. Creating, modifying and terminating Service Agreements are also easy.
Agility can audit all information about Service Agreements. The audit makes it possible to go back in history and get the full picture of how each Service Agreement has changed over time. As audit can have an impact on performance it is possible to configure the audit level or disable the audit completely.
Agility comes with its own SQL-like query language to search for Service Agreements. This makes it easy to find Service Agreements that match certain conditions.
Domains are a way of hosting multiple groups of policies on a single Agility server. This allows one server to share its resources, without requiring all policies to share Service Agreements and events. Think of domains as virtual hosting for Service Agreements. Each domain has its own set of Service Agreements, Policies and events. It is also possible to create Service Agreements between Domains on the same server.
It is possible to export Service Agreements to XML. This makes it easy to extract information held in Service Agreements and it is also the basis for backing up Service Agreements. Additionally, the export is the means by which users can migrate their data to other installations or versions of Agility.
The Arjuna team has two decades of experience in building fault-tolerant systems and so Agility has been built with recoverability and error handling from the outset. This means that Agility will deal with crashes, network outages, policy errors and all other failure scenarios.
Over the years we have built an extensive suite of tests to ensure a high level of quality. Our test suite goes well beyond unit tests, we run full functional tests with multiple Agility servers on multiple operating systems. We also test recoverability and error handling to guarantee Agility can cope with real system failures.
