Monitoring Instance Health with Alerts

FME Flow Hosted provides tools to monitor your instance infrastructure and receive alerts when there is an issue.

What Can I Monitor?

You can create alerts to monitor these indicators on the health of your FME Flow Hosted instance:

Primary Disk Usage: The data storage on the primary disk that you specified when you launched or resized your instance.
Server Load: Server load expresses how many processes are waiting in the queue to access the processor, and can be a very useful indicator of whether there is an issue with the server. If there are a lot of processes backing up, then the load increases.
Number of Engines: The number of FME Engines available to run on the instance.
Server Response Time: Server response time is the internal response time of the web server that serves the FME Flow web application and REST API. A long response time indicates an instance that is underpowered because of high load, or an issue with the server (memory leak or runaway process) that has stolen resources.
Memory Usage: The amount of memory currently in use on the instance.
Temporary Disk Usage: The data storage on the temporary disk that you specified when you launched or resized your instance.
Unresponsive Server: This alert is already created with an instance. It triggers when the instance stops sending data or FME Flow does not respond for 15 minutes. This alert indicates either a hardware/network failure or the Apache Tomcat web application server has stopped functioning.

How Can I Receive Alerts?

You can receive alerts through email, Slack, or any web service via Webhooks. Email alerts can be sent to recipients external to FME Flow Hosted, or to other FME Flow Hosted account members, via their designated email address.

How Does it Work?

When you create an alert, you specify a group of predefined services and FME Flow Hosted account members to handle or receive the alert. For example, you might create an alert on a group that consists of two external email addresses, one FME Flow Hosted account member (a designated, internal email address), and one Slack service. When the specified conditions for the alert trigger, the alert is sent to all services and account members in the group.

Are Any Alerts Already Created?

By default, FME Flow Hosted creates the following alerts with new and/or existing instances:

Disk Usage: This alert is created with new instances only, and is configured to trigger when disk usage is above 90% for ten minutes. By default, it is assigned to notify the email address of the user who launches the instance. This alert is fully editable.
Response Time: This alert is created with new instances only, and is configured to trigger when response time is above 500 ms for ten minutes. By default, it is assigned to notify the email address of the user who launches the instance. This alert is fully editable.
Unhealthy server: This alert calls the /healthcheck endpoint of the FME Flow REST API and triggers if FME Flow has not been in a ready state to process jobs for 15 minutes, even when the web services component of FME Flow may still be responding. On new instances, it is assigned by default to notify the email address of the user who launches the instance. You can edit the notification settings of this alert, but the alert conditions are not editable.
Unresponsive server: This alert triggers when the instance stops sending data or FME Flow does not respond for 15 minutes. It indicates either a hardware/network failure or the Apache Tomcat web application server has stopped functioning. On new instances, it is assigned by default to notify the email address of the user who launches the instance. On older instances, this alert was added retroactively, but was not assigned to notify any users or groups. You can edit the notification settings of this alert, but the alert conditions are not editable.

How Do I Get Started?

To set up instance monitoring and create alerts (or edit existing alerts), perform the following tasks:

Configuring Services: Services define the communication protocols for delivering alerts. FME Flow Hosted supports email, Slack, and Webhooks.

Note If you plan to deliver alerts only to other FME Flow Hosted account members via their designated email addresses, you can skip this step.

Configuring Groups: A group is the collection of services and FME Flow Hosted account members assigned to an alert.
Creating and Editing an Alert: Define the instance conditions that trigger the alert, and the group you want to notify.