Hey Mike, great questions.
1. Workato Intake/Prioritization - problably the toughest challenge for any technology team. One approach we took to address this is to focus on the value of the integration/automation that was being proposed (Workato has a great training on the academy for continuous value reporting). This was a good activity for us to do on 2 fronts - first to justify our budget requests and provide value statements to our CIO/CFO and to highlight the value of the automation teams, and secondly to make our stakeholders think about the value of partnering with the automation team (and we could sometimes use it for prioritization). We would often tie new connections or groups of recipes to larger business goals (whatever pushed the larger company goals further got priority, and we often had to work with our stakeholders to get their VP behind the project to get prioritization - great for visibility and for knowing what was really important). The shortest answer to prioritization is that we had a steering committee and agile scrum teams that prioritized their backlog, but we couldn't rely on that because each stakeholder thought their project should have priority. In the end our Workato teams got the final say on what got prioritized and hopefully we gave our CIO enough justification that he would back us up.
2. We had some API endpoints that got blasted with requests, and I am under the impression that they got queued up. Do you have rate monitoring setup for the api access profile (maybe that's the issue?). Some of our API endpoints were hit at specific times based on scheduled tasks from our products, and I know that the recipe would process requests for an hour or more to get through all the requests at those "burst" periods. I don't know exactly how the product teams called the API endpoints, perhaps they were handling the exceptions on their end but they certainly never mentioned it to me.
3. We have 4 different workato workspaces (Dev, Test, Stage, Prod) and 4 different teams using them. Only our Workato admins have access to production to make changes. We do have specific folders for each team and their team profiles could only access their own folders. Moving recipes between environments is a chore, but we also keep a JSON copy of every recipe in GitHub. We have a step in our Jira workflow (we use Jira to monitor development stories) to export the JSON and attach it to the Jira for the admin to deploy it to production (which also allowed us to ensure all SOX compliance, testing, and sign-offs were completed). I would love for Workato to allow easier comparison of recipes between environments and to be able to push recipes from one workspace to another and I think they have mentioned this for future roadmaps. We don't really use the manifests except as a means to get the JSON to move between environments.
