Understanding Service Level Agreements in GoAnywhere
Written by Helder Vieira
Updated at March 2nd, 2023
SLAs have a source and an action. Actions can either be to call a project or send an email. For projects you can pass variables from the SLA into the project; For emails, you can specify a recipient lists both for when the SLA has been and has not been met.
Monitor based SLAs
The source is any monitor and is watching for a given file appearing at some point during the day. It can not fire again during the same day. Unlike Accolm Business Activity Monitor (BAM) the monitor cannot be set to a specific time period. This means it cannot work for example for a file that should arrive between 4 and 5pm.
Trigger and Project based SLAs
The source can be any GoAnywhere Trigger or project, and unlike Monitors, can be set to watch during a given period of time. It can watch for a certain number of events, for example you must receive 3 files named payroll.csv within a certain time window.
Key comparisons to BAM
Triggers & Projects give similar results to BAM, however Monitors are oddly lacking in functionality. As a consequence, they are less likely to be used. The obvious replacement would be the project SLA, however this can only track the execution of a project, not individual files. So if a file monitor trips a project 5 times during a six hour window, this is all that you know. You cannot say whether a certain number of files have been transferred (a problem if you are using wildcards and potentially transferring multiple files in a project).
Key difference:
BAM allows a warning to be issued prior to an SLA deadline expiring, whereas GAMFT SLAs do not. This is a key benefit that seems to have been missed from GAMFT. EFT and MOVEit Automation both allow execution of a workflow or sending of an email if a file is not transferred in a certain time window so in this aspect GAMFT is playing catch-up (a GAMFT schedule does not have this functionality)
So the more I think about it, the more I think that GAMFT SLAs are not really SLAs, although a definite step up from the existing schedule functionality.