Monitor system performance

To successfully build and operate enterprise systems, an organization must have an enterprise IT monitoring and response framework that applies to those systems. Proactive monitoring is as important as reactive problem-solving, and effective telemetry capture key to point in time awareness as well as identifying system performance trends. ArcGIS-specific and system telemetry should be integrated into existing enterprise IT monitoring patterns wherever possible, to ensure that IT staff can have holistic system awareness.

Health, reliability and performance monitoring strategies for working with ArcGIS systems can vary depending on whether your system is deployed with a SaaS foundation, with ArcGIS Enterprise on Windows or Linux, using Kubernetes, ArcGIS Location Platform or a hybrid of these options. Some recommendations and options for monitoring in each scenario are described below.

Monitor ArcGIS deployments

The level of monitoring and telemetry that is available for the ArcGIS software components of a system first depends on the deployment architecture:

  • ArcGIS Online is a SaaS offering, which does not expose detailed system performance metrics for underlying infrastructure and software internals. It does, however, offer ways to observe system utilization and health. Organizations can monitor the health and availability of broader ArcGIS Online services and key components at the ArcGIS Online Health Dashboard, as well as ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World live feed status. You may view and report on usage status of an ArcGIS Online subscription, including organization’s credit usage, member status and activity, content usage, apps, and groups. Also consider monitoring usage of specific items, including maps, layers, and other content. Learn more about best practices for organization maintenance in ArcGIS Online. ArcGIS Hub also provides a Dashboard for each Initiative or Site, which can be used to see activity and usage of the site and content, along with a Hub-specific status page. If an organization uses the ArcGIS Online Premium Feature Data Store, monitoring of the compute and storage usage of that component is available through the Organization tab.
  • ArcGIS Enterprise on Windows and Linux can be monitored in a variety of ways including application-specific server logs for each component and server statistics. In addition to monitoring the ArcGIS Enterprise software, it is important to monitor all supporting components and infrastructure such as the Windows or Linux operating system, databases and other data stores, as well as compute, network, security, and other infrastructure.
  • ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes can be observed in a variety of ways including system logs and health monitoring through ArcGIS Enterprise Manager. In addition to monitoring the ArcGIS Enterprise software, it is important to monitor all supporting components and infrastructure such the Kubernetes environment, databases and other data stores, as well as compute, network, security, and other infrastructure.
  • ArcGIS Location Platform, as a PaaS offering, does not support observation of its underlying infrastructure and software internals. It does; however, offer ways for its developers to observe system utilization and health. This includes monitoring usage of location services and layers through the ArcGIS Location Platform dashboard.

Regardless of the deployment type, it’s crucial to define clear monitoring objectives, set up relevant performance metrics, and establish meaningful alert thresholds to support effective and proactive management and optimization of your ArcGIS Enterprise environment.

Monitor physical resources and utilization

Alongside monitoring the ArcGIS components, it is important to also be aware of, and consistently monitor the hardware signals that are available for the system, which can vary based on the deployment pattern, system hosting configuration, and operating system.

All operating systems provide a method for monitoring key system indicators, such as CPU utilization (overall and by-process), memory usage (physical and virtual), disk utilization (storage available, disk I/O), or network usage (bandwidth and total transfer). These statistics can all be used to establish a regular baseline for a system, monitor for deviations from the baseline, and then be used to correlate any system issues or outages to measured changes to the hardware utilization of a system. Some organizations may already have an enterprise monitoring solution or software component that collects information on these metrics, and where that is broadly used, it is generally a best practice to continue using that approach as there will be an economy of scale with user training, alerting and experience.

ArcGIS Monitor

ArcGIS Monitor is an enterprise-grade monitoring solution that works with ArcGIS Enterprise by providing information about system health, usage, and performance. It captures key metrics and attributes to quantify system health over time, offering real-time and historical performance metrics for various components, including ArcGIS Server, Portal for ArcGIS, and ArcGIS Data Store. ArcGIS Monitor can help to identify performance bottlenecks and issues, allowing for proactive management and optimizing your on-premises deployment, as well as notify system administrators when a component stops responding or reports an unexpected response to a standard query. This process can assist with rapid response to system issues but also with root cause analysis to identify the conditions that contributed to an outage or failure once it has been resolved. ArcGIS Monitor is the only monitoring solution that effectively combines ArcGIS metrics such as instance usage with hardware and performance monitoring metrics such as memory pressure or network saturation, providing a comprehensive view of ArcGIS-specific performance or stability issues.

On-premises

ArcGIS systems deployed on-premises to a virtual machine host or private network, using ArcGIS Enterprise for Windows, Linux or Kubernetes, have additional monitoring considerations and options, including:

  • Third-party monitoring tools – Solutions like Nagios, Zabbix, Prometheus, and Grafana are often used monitor the performance of hardware, servers, and network resources in your on-premises infrastructure.
  • Database monitoring tools – If a relational databases is configured with am ArcGIS Enterprise deployment, database-specific monitoring tools such as Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio can help to monitor and optimize the database performance.

Amazon Web Services

Systems deployed in AWS can make use of Amazon-specific monitoring tools, which are robust and designed to assist with the monitoring of critical systems build on AWS. These tools include:

  • CloudWatch – AWS provides Amazon CloudWatch, a native monitoring and observability service. You can use CloudWatch to monitor the performance of EC2 instances, RDS databases, and other AWS resources that are part of your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment in the AWS cloud.
  • Third-Party Tools – You can also integrate third-party monitoring solutions like New Relic, Datadog, or AppDynamics with your AWS-hosted ArcGIS Enterprise to gain comprehensive performance insights.

Microsoft Azure

Systems deployed in Azure can take advantage of existing monitoring tools or approaches provided by Microsoft directly to Azure users and customers, including:

  • Azure Monitor – Microsoft Azure offers Azure Monitor, a native monitoring and diagnostics service. Azure Monitor allows you to collect and analyze performance data from various Azure resources, including virtual machines, databases, and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters if used in your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment.
  • Third-Party Integrations – Like with AWS, you can integrate third-party monitoring solutions like Dynatrace or SolarWinds with your Azure-hosted ArcGIS Enterprise for enhanced performance monitoring.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

GCP-specific monitoring tools and options include:

  • Cloud Monitoring (formerly Stackdriver) – Google Cloud provides Cloud Monitoring, which offers monitoring and observability capabilities for GCP resources. You can monitor virtual machines, databases, and other components used in your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment on GCP.
  • Third-Party Solutions – GCP allows integration with third-party monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana.

In all cloud environments, it is essential to configure monitoring and alerting based on your specific needs and the resources in use. Cloud-native monitoring services typically offer integration with alerting mechanisms to notify you of performance issues in real-time.

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