Administering and Monitoring Your ArcGIS Organization Webinar Q&A

August 2, 2023

Michelle Brake

We’re answering your questions from our “Administering and Monitoring Your ArcGIS Organization” webinar. This post will dive into your questions on best practices for administering your organization and how ArcGIS Monitor provides insights about ArcGIS Enterprise.

Staying current on best practices and new capabilities for administration workflows and organization monitoring is key to ensuring a healthy organization. Back in May, my colleague Derek Law and I covered everything to do with monitoring and administering your ArcGIS organization. We learned about built-in tools available to help you administer your ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise organizations. Covered how ArcGIS Monitor can help you optimize your ArcGIS Enterprise through performance, health and system usage monitoring. Before finishing off with some key considerations for ArcGIS Enterprise upgrade, backup and recovery plans. You can access the webinar recording if you missed it or want a refresher!

Throughout the webinar, you submitted some great questions about administering and monitoring ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise. With time being limited we couldn’t get to all of your questions in the webinar, so we wanted to put together this Q&A to ensure you have all you need to know.

Organization Settings

Q: If organization colours are updated, will content using the organization theme update automatically or will the updates only apply to new content?

A: Yes, they do! If the organization theme is chosen when building a web app, then the colours in the web app will automatically update if the colours change in the organization default theme. The exception to this is if there is no default theme option and you are manually setting the colours yourself.

Q: Are categories the preferred method for organizing content vs. folders?

A: Categories and folders serve different purposes in helping you stay organized. If you are looking to organize content within for your user, then folders are still a great tool to utilize for navigating personal content. They provided visual spaces for you to separate content in a way that makes sense to you without needing to be organization wide.

If you are looking for a way to increase general content searching and navigation, this is where categories come in. Content categories can be used to organize group and organization content. Content categories make discovering content such as maps, scenes, apps and layers easier. Organizations, group owners and managers can configure their own custom categories or use standard category sets.

Q: Can a Category be set to private (only visible to admin staff)?

A: Member categories are only visible to users that are Administrators in the organization. Group categories are only visible to users who can access the group. Finally, we have content categories that are visible to the entire organization. There is currently no way to set specific content categories to be private.

Q: For Member Categories - can you update roles for an entire group at once?

A: Yes, you can! Once you have selected a member category as a filter, you can then select some or all of the users and update the roles, user type, add-on licenses, group ownership and credits at once. The only exception to this is that you can’t update the user type or role for users who are administrators for the organization this way.

ArcGIS Online members tab showing two users have been selected. There are red boxes around the GIS department category and the manage user type button. 

Administrators can use member categories to group users for bulk updates such as role, user type, add-on licenses, and credits. 

Credits

Q: Can you explain the purpose of credits?

A: Credits are the currency used across the ArcGIS ecosystem and are consumed for specific transactions and types of storage, such as storing features, performing analytics and using premium content. Any ArcGIS software that interacts with ArcGIS Online, such as ArcGIS Enterprise, ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Insights or ArcGIS Field Maps, can use credits. However, most of what you do in ArcGIS Online does not require credits! For more information on credits, check out the Mastering ArcGIS Online Credits: Empowering Administrators for Success blog or the Understand Credits documentation.

Using Credits: Storage

Using Credits: Transactions

Q: Is there a way to set credits at a higher level than by user? Groups, member category, etc?

A: Currently, credit usage is set only at the user level. This ensures that users can see their allotment of credits without any surprises of it shrinking from other users' usage. This question did come up a few times, so it sounds like there are some use cases where this functionality would be key. We recommend posting this to the ArcGIS Online Ideas board in the Esri Community for other users to help promote!

ArcGIS Monitor

Q: Does ArcGIS Monitor have the capabilities to work with High Availability environments and multi-machine deployments?

A: Yes! ArcGIS Monitor can register and monitor ArcGIS Enterprise deployments participating in HA and multi-machine deployments. It can also be used with single-network and multi-network deployments of ArcGIS Enterprise, which you can read more about in the Inside an ArcGIS Monitor deployment documentation.

Q: Could you provide insights on the return on investment (ROI) associated with adding ArcGIS Monitor to ArcGIS Enterprise?

A: At a high level, using ArcGIS Monitor helps admins improve Enterprise GIS system performance and prevents/reduces system downtime – which can save on operational costs long-term. Here are some customer success stories to give some insight into the ROI for utilizing ArcGIS Monitor within your organization:

Q: Can you use Monitor to get reports from license manager (located on different server then Enterprise/Monitor) to have view on desktop license usage?

A: This capability is not currently available in ArcGIS Monitor 2023. Although it is being considered for a future release. Please vote for the enhancement on the ArcGIS Monitor Ideas forum,
Ability to monitor ArcGIS License Server in Monitor 2023! This helps us to gauge interest on popular ideas and what functionality is important to users.

Q: Is there documentation on how to configure the new monitor that you can send along?

A: You can find the ArcGIS Monitor 2023 help documentation here. If there are specific areas that you still have questions about, reach out to your Account Manager for more resources or to Technical Support for process specific issues.

Q: Does ArcGIS Monitor provide metrics on the items or web maps in Portal (i.e. how many times a layer was turned on or off)?

A: ArcGIS Monitor does not provide detailed metrics for Portal content, like how often a layer was turned on or off in an app or web map. Instead, Monitor provides some information on enterprise portal items such as the number of items of each type, number of users, number of groups, number of different user types, etc. Monitor will provide more information in future releases, such as which items are the most popular, most viewed, etc. If you have ideas or workflows that could use this kind of functionality, let us know on the ArcGIS Monitor Ideas section in the Esri Community!

Q: We are running ArcGIS Monitor 10.8.1, planning the upgrade to 2023. My understanding is that the database requirements changed at this release. Does the upgrade migrate the historical data to the new database?

A: ArcGIS Monitor 2023 uses PostgreSQL as its underlying DBMS platform; it does not use SQL Server. There is no direct upgrade path from Monitor 10.8.1 to Monitor 2023. ArcGIS Monitor 2023 is a completely new product from Monitor 10.8.1, meaning it has a different architecture and framework. This is a transition release, meaning you will need to deploy a new installation of ArcGIS Monitor 2023. Migrating data metrics from Monitor 10.8.1 to the Monitor 2023 database is not currently supported.

Q: I do see that ArcGIS Monitor requires PostgreSQL. Do we get alerts on any new security vulnerabilities for this database from Esri, or is this something we need to check on our end?

A: ArcGIS Monitor will not provide any information on DBMS updates for the underlying PostgreSQL install where the ArcGIS Monitor database is deployed. This would be something that an admin would need to maintain.

Q: What is the best way to monitor ArcGIS Enterprise without using ArcGIS Monitor?

A: Without ArcGIS Monitor, administrators should be regularly reviewing the logs of various ArcGIS Enterprise components and their associated machines. Below are two resources to help guide you through best practices for maintaining your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment.

Q: Does ArcGIS Monitor uses Windows IIS logs on the Enterprise Server to provide reports?

A: No, ArcGIS Monitor does not use the Windows IIS logs on the Enterprise Server to provide reports. Instead, it queries the ArcGIS Server REST API and its logs to get information for its data metric reports.

That covers your questions about administering and monitoring your ArcGIS organization. Make sure to check out our upcoming webinars for more tips and tricks to improve your workflows!