The Milky Way Galaxy, our home, is a complex ecosystem where a cyclical transformation process brings diffuse barionic matter into dense unstable condensations to form stars, that produce radiant energy for billions of years before releasing chemically enriched material back into the ISM in their final stages of evolution. Star formation is the trigger of this process, eventually driving the evolution of ordinary matter in the Universe from its primordial composition to the present-day chemical diversity necessary for the birth of life. I will present an overview of the Milky Way Galaxy as a star formation engine as painted by the last generation Galactic Plane surveys in continuum and molecular lines. Pivoting around the Herschel Hi-GAL far infrared and submillimeter survey, the multiwavelength Milky Way now offers a complete and statistically significant observational scenario from diffuse ISM clouds, through the pervasive network of filamentary structures, down to the formation of dense clumps and embedded stellar clusters from the individual star formation site to the panoramic view of entire spiral arms. With the VIALACTEA project we organised and analysed these datasets in a unified framework, deploying a homogeneous analysis and classification scheme for nearly 30,000 candidate filamentary structures and more than 100,000 dense clumps with heliocentric distance determinations. We are now able to complete the first resolved map of the Star Formation Rate in the Milky Way and analyse in detail its variation with Galactocentric distance and with respect to spiral arms, as well as in comparison to star formation triggering agents.