Hi People
I have a bit of a weird scenario that has stumped our IT team and our FME consultants.
Our setup is that we have FME Flow Hosted as the controller which passes the jobs to an on-premise FME Flow server. Whenever the on-premise server is restarted (e.g. Windows patching) Flow Hosted loses the connection.
While that is to be expected, the connection doesn’t come back on its own when the on-premise engines are back on-line, nor can it be restarted (it hangs on initialising). The only way to reconnect the Hosted service to the Remote Engines is to complete drop the Remote Engine configuration and recreate it.
Has anyone else come across this or, more hopefully, fixed it?
Thanks
Solved
Connection to Remote Engines Keeps Failing
+2- Contributor
Best answer by nickcumming
Hi db23451,
Thanks for sharing - this is a weird scenario.
The fact that recreating the Remote Engine configuration is the only reliable fix lines up with something we've seen internally on 2026.1, and it resembles an older Flow Hosted issue that was fixed back in 2024.1. The current one is tracked as FMEFLOW-27974 if you're working with support on this.
In the cases we've seen, the core reports the Remote Engines Service (RES) as "Ready", jobs sit in the queue and never dispatch, and altering the RES config flips the status to "Initializing" indefinitely. Removing and re-adding the remote engines service was our solution too. Considering how similar this is to your situation, I think we may have something useful for you here.
In our testing we observed that the behavior is different if the FME services on the RES server are stopped before the shut down. The issue was only seen if the host machine running the RES is shut down without shutting down the services.
If this turns out to be the case for you there may be a preventative measure — wrapping any restarts (e.g. patching windows) in a clean service-stop → reboot → service-start. This may give you a workable interim process rather than rebuilding the configuration.
Sorry for the disruption on your end — I hope this gives you something to work with. Happy to keep digging once you've had a chance to test.
Nick.
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Helpful Links
+12- Safer
- Best Answer
Hi db23451,
Thanks for sharing - this is a weird scenario.
The fact that recreating the Remote Engine configuration is the only reliable fix lines up with something we've seen internally on 2026.1, and it resembles an older Flow Hosted issue that was fixed back in 2024.1. The current one is tracked as FMEFLOW-27974 if you're working with support on this.
In the cases we've seen, the core reports the Remote Engines Service (RES) as "Ready", jobs sit in the queue and never dispatch, and altering the RES config flips the status to "Initializing" indefinitely. Removing and re-adding the remote engines service was our solution too. Considering how similar this is to your situation, I think we may have something useful for you here.
In our testing we observed that the behavior is different if the FME services on the RES server are stopped before the shut down. The issue was only seen if the host machine running the RES is shut down without shutting down the services.
If this turns out to be the case for you there may be a preventative measure — wrapping any restarts (e.g. patching windows) in a clean service-stop → reboot → service-start. This may give you a workable interim process rather than rebuilding the configuration.
Sorry for the disruption on your end — I hope this gives you something to work with. Happy to keep digging once you've had a chance to test.
Nick.
---
Helpful Links
+2- Contributor
Hi Nick
Just an update for anyone else who stumbles across this post. Shutting down the services before rebooting worked nicely - Flow Hosted showed them as offline, but they came back up on their own after rebooting.