(Source: arcgis.com)
Written by: Todd Buehlman, LOGIC Solutions Group
Having accurate geographical information about land management, operations and processing is critical to making informed decisions. Key to delivering accurate information is the overall health of your GIS.
Our ArcGIS Health Checklist is geared to help you spot-check a few areas within ArcSDE, ArcGIS Server and Portal for ArcGIS that impact the overall system wellness. These are not meant to be comprehensive, but more of a “tips and tricks” list to keep your GIS healthy, fast and supportable in the future.
ArcGIS Health Checklist:
Appropriate Indexing – Don’t index everything, but index the right things in the right order. Over indexing adds overhead to your system.
Appropriate Nesting – Feature datasets are great for network datasets and other constructs that require the technology; however, using them for organization like folders can cause unwanted side effects.
Know The Differences – There are quite a few database platforms available for ArcSDE, know where each one is strongest and the reasons why to select one over another. There have been numerous side by side comparisons published between Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle for instance. Easy to find online.
Don’t Forget To Compress – Posting and compressing an ArcSDE database regularly is one of the most important things to consider when using ANY versioned data.
Benchmark Your Services – Utilize industry standard benchmarking tools to set a bar and measure yourself against. Take note of what your users consider acceptable performance times and scale your services to match. If national real estate service is performing poorly consider breaking it into multiple services that are “fit-for-purpose” or regional rather than have one large service.
Clean Up After Yourself – Be aware of your server performance and plan to expand accordingly, the number of services you host out can affect your performance even if the services are not being used.
Register Your Portal
items with appropriate metadata for ease of search – make sure your services are discoverable and easily added to maps.
HTTPS and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) – Decide your security model up front. Portal will default to HTTPS (secure, encrypted) even within your firewall upon installation. A little planning up front can pay off exponentially.
Groups and Gallery Viewers – If you are using Gold Standard style data management it is important to let the users know which data is “golden”. The use of special groups, users or well-organized gallery apps can also be helpful.
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There are many layers to successfully managing a multi-server GIS architecture and sometimes seemingly simple tasks can get complicated. Remember to have a well thought out plan before getting started in the Platform. Let us know if LOGIC can help you install or optimize your Esri Platform.