Auto-Pause After Inactivity for FME Flow Hosted Instances

Hi ​@dalimelki!

Thanks for reaching out. Your question about auto-shutdown after a period of time is a popular question from our users. We’d love to implement something like this internally, but we’re unable to do so.

FME Flow Hosted’s security model is setup in such a way that not even the development team who built/maintain Flow Hosted have access to the actual FME Flow instance on the machines we maintain - we have no way of knowing what is happening on those instances, like when jobs were last run. 

Now, that said, I do have an option that you may want to try out. I’ve whipped up a workspace that will check your Flow instance for activity and let you pause it.

Pre-requisites:

• FME Flow Hosted API Token - this can be created from your dashboard. Login to Flow Hosted → click on your account name on the top right corner → Settings → API Tokens.
• The Instance Id of the instance that you want to control from Flow Hosted
• FME Flow Web Service/Connection setup in FME Form (details here) - this is what you’d use in Form to connect to your Flow instance

Using the attached workspace (which I hope is documented enough for you to adjust if you need), upload it to your Flow instance and schedule it to run on a regular basis (every 10 minutes? every hour?). It’ll check the job history of your flow instance, ignoring this job (based on the filename), and check how long ago your last job was completed. If it exceeds your threshold time, it’ll send the command to the Flow Hosted API to shut down your instance. 

Note: the attached workflow was built in 2025.0, so I’ve included screenshots below if you need to replicate it in a older version.
 

I hope this helps - please don’t hesitate to reach out with any further questions or new ideas!

Many Thanks ​@NickAtSafe !

That was helpful , I’ll definitely share it internally and reach out to you if I have any questions.

Regrards,