1200+ FME Workspaces in Hand?

As the second biggest FME user in the Netherlands, ProRail (charged for the management of the main railway network in the Netherlands) has more than 1200 workspaces and more than 10 applications running on the FME server. It is challenging to manage so many workspaces when thinking of scheduling, automatic workflow, data dependencies, monitoring, FME Upgrade, etc. How to tackle these challenges?

In this presentation, we will talk about our proven experience, on how ProRail works together with its FME partner Tensing to achieve a satisfied result. The challenges are taken at both the management level and technology level. At management level, working closely with FME application manager, working agreements such as usage of database-connections, workspace name conventions, etc., are set up to achieve an easy manageable and scalable FME workspaces; At technology level, FME tooling workspace detector has been developed to understand data dependencies in workspaces. The process sequence can be determined automatically according to data dependencies to avoid data conflicts in scheduled jobs. The process sequence is further used in the Schedulingtool, developed by ProRail, for automatic scheduling, monitoring and process overview; FME tooling workspace controller has been developed to control the workspaces against working agreements to make sure the it is well followed; In order to visualize the capacity that is used per server engine and per application, monitoring dashboards are made and used daily to provide an overview of all the activities of the last 24 hours to detect abnormal behaviors on the FME-server. The capacity usage information helps the application manager in decision making and communication

Our experience has shown that a good management system on the FME server can provide a stable production environment and ease the workload during development, production release, and migrations. Active monitoring helps in capacity planning and process scheduling.