This article may reference work, projects, customers, and contracts related to NV5 legacy companies before their acquisition by NV5.
Esri overhauled and released ArcGIS Monitor 2023 earlier this year. With this release, the NV5 Managed Services team took a deep dive into ArcGIS Monitor 2023 to review the monitoring solution's capabilities and ensure that when we implement it for our clients that they can stay ahead of system and performance issues. Read on for an extensive look into how ArcGIS Monitor 2023 can provide GIS health and performance value to Managed Services clients.
NV5 has been delivering cloud-based, Esri-centric services for nearly a decade, providing dozens of clients with highly varied offerings and managed services ranging from very simple, consolidated deployment patterns to robust, fault-tolerant and highly available systems.
Within this offering we provide system checks, maintenance, and troubleshooting of all the machines and components of a client’s ArcGIS Enterprise deployment. Additional services we provide include ArcGIS Enterprise installation, infrastructure deployment (cloud networks) and managing networks (monitoring, scaling, security, etc.). We also verify system function and performance. These last two offerings require monitoring tools to alert us of potential problems.
There are numerous options for monitoring an ArcGIS Enterprise system from custom solutions, to Paessler’s PRTG Network Monitor solutions, and ArcGIS Monitor 10.x. The following article covers several options: Monitoring the Health of ArcGIS Enterprise. Historically, we have implemented both PRTG solutions and ArcGIS Monitor 10.8.1 for numerous clients. Additionally, we have leveraged ArcGIS Monitor 10.8.1 to create robust reporting capabilities to analyze ArcGIS Enterprise system performance.
As part of our yearly workflow evaluation effort, we identified a process improvement to centralize our monitoring to be more proactive. Part of this was to standardize and consolidate our monitoring systems to reduce the number of places we needed to go to collect system information. Getting a thorough look at ArcGIS Monitor 2023 would allow us to make it our recommended solution for our managed services’ clients.
What is ArcGIS Monitor 2023?
ArcGIS Monitor is an enterprise-grade monitoring solution specifically designed for ArcGIS Enterprise. It provides comprehensive insights into system health, usage, and performance, capturing metrics and data related to overall health. It transforms system-level data into actionable insights, enabling proactive issue identification and resolution. These metrics empower you to optimize system health, reducing downtime, boosting user satisfaction, and trimming operational costs through proactive alerts. The new web interface aligns with other the ArcGIS Enterprise solutions.
Why did we evaluate ArcGIS Monitor to support our Managed Services offerings?
We were looking to expand our monitoring solutions to stay ahead of system issues. When Esri overhauled and released ArcGIS Monitor 2023 earlier this year our team decided to take an extensive look into how it could provide value to our Managed Services clients.
Within a few weeks we saw the value of the ArcGIS Monitor 2023 offerings. It aligned with our goals to proactively address potential performance issues and system failures. The built-in alerting and notifications allowed us to receive alerts in our inbox.
The functionality we have gained the most value from includes the following items.
For ArcGIS Server we monitor all the metrics provided out of the box by ArcGIS Monitor 2023. Some of these are site machines availability, request response time (avg), request the rate, request error percent, and requests time out. Issues with Site Availability tells our team that the system may not be able to address all the workload - an issue we investigate quickly for all our clients. When we receive alerts about request response times (average of max) we know our clients are experiencing performance issues. Our team diligently works to get ahead of these issues to keep up customer satisfaction.
For Portal for ArcGIS, we monitor the health check status for the federation and the index. The first provides insight into the overall status of the federation between Portal and all federated ArcGIS server machines.
Tracking metric trends over time as an ArcGIS Enterprise deployment grows allows our team to adapt, plan, and rearchitect an environment. First, observing increases in the number of ArcSOCs on an ArcGIS Server host over time tells us how often new services are added monthly, yearly, etc. In addition, observing increases in the number of content items of a particular type in Portal for ArcGIS highlights to our team a key function the client depends on. Finally, keeping tabs on the number of Portal for ArcGIS content items that have been shared publicly highlights security concerns we need to monitor consistently.
In addition to the ArcGIS Enterprise components, we manage and maintain the host machines these components are deployed on. A couple of key performance metrics we track are CPU utilization, and memory utilized. CPU utilization is the proportion of CPU resources in use and memory utilized is the proportion of memory in use. Values approaching 100 for either of these metrices may indicate that more resources are needed to handle the workload. Our team will want to know if this happening at a moment in time or trending consistently overtime. For example, CPU may spike briefly to complete a large operation, which may not be a cause for concern. However, if CPU percentages are consistently over 80% our team will evaluate the capacity plan and architect adjustments. ArcGIS Monitor provides easily configurable analytics tools for tracking trends over time. Analyses can be used to ensure that key performance indicators (KPIs) and/or service level agreements (SLIs) are met.
ArcGIS Monitor 2023 provides timely metrics, configurable analytics and customizable alerts that enable us to provide unsurpassed support to our Managed Services clients.
If you would like to learn more about implementing ArcGIS Monitor 2023 to support your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment or to learn about NV5’s Managed Services offerings, schedule an appointment today.
