What webmaps/dashboards are using a feature layer?

Question

I would like to find a way to see what maps/webapps/dashboards etc consuming one of an organization/group shared hosted feature layers?

I don't mind others using layers I stand up, kind of the point of sharing them.  The problem comes if I want to make a schema change.  I don't have a good way to notify those consuming the layer.  So I could accidently break someone's map/dashboard etc.  Which if it's public facing would be bad.

Would love to find a way to tell what products are using a feature layer in both AGO and portal.

Kevin_MacLeod · Answer

I came here to suggest this same thing.

It would be great if the ‘Usage’ tab on a featurelayers’s Item Details tab would show this. It shows the number of user views, but not which webmaps and apps it’s in use by.  Basically, if I delete a hosted feature layer what am I going to break.  I’ve long wanted something like that to manage the mountain of data we all have.  Same for SDE; it’d be so great to have a one-click button to see what services are using a featureclass; to know what’s locking it when you want to change a featureclass schema.  I think I suggested this as an Idea about 12 years ago.  As far as I know it's still not a functionality.  Maybe I could write python to do that but I'm not good enough at python to do that yet in a time-efficient manner. There are also probably weird edge cases depending on server setup, Enterprise version, RDBMS etc. This kind of data management makes the most sense as an out of the box tool with a GUI, as well as API for use in python and Model Builder. Same for the webmap/hosted featureclass usage idea above.

Team Esri- any thoughts if this is on a future roadmap?

GrantHoward1 · Answer

We haven't implemented it yet but we purchased a tool from GeoJobe. It advertises that it does what you are asking, which is also the main reason we purchased it. Hopefully it will be a resolution. https://geo-jobe.com/admin-tools/

jcarlson · Answer

In Portal, there is the property dependent_upon, but it's only available in Portal via the Python API. But it's not a comprehensive list anyway.

The only way I've found to identify dependent items like this is to loop through all maps and look at the operationalLayers object of the JSON to see if your feature layer's URL shows up there. There's a post somewhere on here where I shared a code snippet that does just that, but I'm having trouble finding it.

If you needed to then find apps dependent upon those maps, you'd have to do a similar loop looking for their itemIDs in the JSON of the apps.

It would be quite the loop to run against outside-org content. But if it only happened on a monthly or weekly basis, it might not be terrible to just let it run over some weekend.