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I am tasked to asses FME and determine if it will be a good fit for our organization as main integration platform. I have done some research on FME and have few questions (where i could not find much documentation):

  1. Does FME have any self-documentation feature or 3rd party add-on which can be used to achieve this? How does most organization maintain design documentation for workspaces?
  2. Can FME Server expose REST APIs that are created by developers or we absolutely need to get a 3rd party API Gateway (AWS, etc.) for hosting APIs, security, etc?
  3. What capabilities FME provides for monitoring (performance, errors, etc.) or all of this has to be designed by developers?
  4. What additional tools are required in the Integration Stack to support basic patterns like APIs and Messaging ? What does your implementation have.

Any pointers to documentation that

Hi @sseth2011,

 

First, I just wanted to thank you for your interest in FME. If you would like to arrange a call with us, please let me know! We can have a screen share to ensure that we can meet your requirements.

 

Does FME have any self-documentation feature or 3rd party add-on which can be used to achieve this? How does most organization maintain design documentation for workspaces?

 

FME is self-documenting because it is a visual interface with transformers. Every transformer has easily accessible documentation that is maintained by Safe. 

2021-03-24_14-41-03 

If you were interested in adding additional documentation, in a workspace you can add additional bookmarks and annotations to better describe what each transformer does for future users. We have a shortlist of best practices when creating a workspace here https://s3.amazonaws.com/gitbook/Desktop-Intro-2020/4.workflows/4.05.best-practice.html

2021-03-24_14-43-44 

Can FME Server expose REST APIs that are created by developers or we absolutely need to get a 3rd party API Gateway (AWS, etc.) for hosting APIs, security, etc?

 

FME Server and Desktop will have access to any API. For examples of this, I would suggest the Getting Started with REST APIs tutorial.

 

FME Server also has its own REST API, which can be used to run the transformations you created on FME Desktop. 

 

By default FME Server is private, however, you can use an FME Cloud instance if you would prefer it to public. Or you can set your FME Server to be public as well through a public DNS.

 

What capabilities FME provides for monitoring (performance, errors, etc.) or all of this has to be designed by developers?

 

FME Desktop will report errors and performance in the logs. Every time you run a translation in FME Desktop a log can be seen at the bottom of the application with details of the job.

 

2021-03-24_15-01-38 

FME Server also has job logs for each transformation, however, you can also set up notifications to alert you if a job fails or you can view memory and CPU usage in the FME Server UI.

 

 

What additional tools are required in the Integration Stack to support basic patterns like APIs and Messaging ? What does your implementation have.

 

FME shouldn’t require any third-party tools to access APIs. 

 

There are many ways to message using FME Desktop a few examples are, we support email (you’ll have to have access to an email server), or Twilio for text messages, or Slack messages. You’d need access to each of these platforms to send a message. 

 

For messaging on FME Server, it depends on what platform you’d like to use for messaging, here’s a list of all the external actions we support. https://docs.safe.com/fme/html/FME_Server_Documentation/WebUI/Automations-General/Automations-External-Actions.htm

 

For more of an overview on FME Server, I’d check out this blog as it does cover a few topics in your questions like integration and APIs. 

 

Please let me know if you have any questions,

Sienna

 

 

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