This article is intended to help Flow Production Tracking Administrators get their servers ready to host Flow Production Tracking.

You said Flow Production Tracking?

Flow Production Tracking is a Production Management Web Platform. Flow Production Tracking is built on Ruby on Rails and uses PostgreSQL as a database management system.

Flow Production Tracking is primarily offered as a Software as a Service (SaaS), but can also be hosted on enterprise servers.

For more information about Shotgun Enterprise architecture, please refer to architecture overview for Flow Production Tracking Enterprise.

Getting Started

The host set up process can be broken down in several phases.

1. Read the Client responsibility agreement to understand your responsibilities as a Flow Production Tracking System Administrator.
2. Determine Flow Production Tracking Cluster topology.
3. Make sure to plan for a staging environment to test changes and maintenance operations on.
4. Minimal server setup
   1. Acquire hardware that meets our Hardware specs for Flow Production Tracking Enterprise
   2. Proceed with the Operating system setup for Flow Production Tracking Enterprise.
   3. You must also make sure that the media storage is properly configured for Flow Production Tracking.
5. Make sure all your servers are accessible through the Flow Production Tracking VPN so you can receive support.
6. Validate your set-up by running the validation script, and send the output in your Setup Support Ticket.
7. Gather all the information you need to properly integrate Flow Production Tracking to your studio infrastructure using the following check-list.
8. When servers are properly configured, you will be provided with all the artifacts you need to install and configure Flow Production Tracking.
   1. The Setup Package should contain, among other things, your Toolkit Key, a Flow Production Tracking License, and an OpenVPN package.
9. Get Flow Production Tracking up and running by going through the Flow Production Tracking Enterprise Quick start example.
10. Complete your Flow Production Tracking local installation with initialization to support periodic usage metering.

Next steps

Flow Production Tracking is now up and running! But your work is not done yet; it just started. As the Flow Production Tracking Administrator, you still have some work to do to make sure Flow Production Tracking is properly managed.

Get familiar with the Flow Production Tracking components, and how to administer them. A lot of information is available on Flow Production Tracking Help Center. In particular:

• Make sure that you have a Staging Instance, to experiment and test on.
• Schedule daily backups of your Production Cluster.
• Make sure that your media storage is properly backed up.
• Learn more about the Flow Production Tracking Architecture.
• Have proper server monitoring in place to be able to monitor the health of your Flow Production Tracking Cluster, and troubleshoot performance issues.
• Configure Toolkit.
• To be able to view media in the Web App, configure the Transcoding Service.
• To receive email notification from Flow Production Tracking, configure the Email Notification Service.

Finally, you can visit the Advanced Configuration section for additional information on topics like enabling HTTPS, configuring LDAP with Shotgun or scaling Flow Production Tracking by adding additional application servers. Please note that we very strongly recommend enabling HTTPS.

Flow Production Tracking support tickets and communication

It is quite important to keep communication via our Flow Production Tracking Support site, through a support ticket. This is true for the initial set up and any other subsequent requests you may have. Using support tickets ensures that you are getting all the information you need. Flow Production Tracking Support is built on top of the Zendesk platform. Using the Flow Production Tracking Support ticketing system is the only way to make sure your requests and questions will be answered and tracked. Make sure that you:

• Use the Flow Production Tracking Support site to answer and ask questions.
• Reply to Zendesk emails, rather than using direct emails, to our Support team.
• Validate that the Zendesk email is not in your Junk folder.