It would be useful to have a built-in way to classify workspaces according to both their operational priority and the type of impact they have.
These are two separate but related properties:
Priority
-
Priority 1 – High
-
Priority 2 – Medium
-
Priority 3 – Low
The priority would indicate how important the workspace is and how quickly it needs attention if it fails.
Impact classification
A workspace could also have one or more impact classifications, for example:
-
Business-critical process
-
System or infrastructure-critical
-
Integration with other systems
-
Data production or distribution
-
Public or external service
-
Internal supporting process
-
Personal workspace
-
Development or testing
Multiple classifications should ideally be allowed. For example, a workspace could support a business-critical process while also integrating with several external systems.
From a system administration perspective, this information would be particularly helpful during:
-
FME Form and Flow upgrades
-
Maintenance and planned downtime
-
Incident response and troubleshooting
-
Workspace testing and validation
-
Dependency analysis
-
Documentation and system inventories
Ideally, the priority and impact classifications could:
-
Be assigned to a workspace in FME Form.
-
Be included when publishing the workspace to FME Flow.
-
Be viewed and modified from the FME Flow Web UI.
-
Be searchable and filterable in FME Flow.
-
Be retained when republishing or migrating a workspace.
-
Be available through the FME Flow REST API.
REST API access would make it possible to include this information in monitoring dashboards, workspace inventories and automated upgrade assessments.
For example, before an upgrade, administrators could identify all Priority 1 workspaces that support business-critical processes or have integrations with other systems. These workspaces could then be prioritized for testing before and immediately after the upgrade.
This could be implemented using dedicated workspace metadata fields or through a standardized tagging and classification system. Dedicated fields would likely make the information more consistent and easier to manage across an organization.
