Entities responsible for distributing work across a group of systems traditionally do not know a great deal about the ability of the applications on those systems to complete the work in a satisfactory fashion. Workload management systems traditionally know a great deal about the health of applications, but have little control over the rate in which these applications receive work. The SASP protocol provides a mechanism for load balancers and workload management systems to communicate better ways of distributing the existing workload to the group members.