ArcGIS Enterprise Blog

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I wanted to bring attention a blog Your Ideas in ArcGIS Enterprise 10.9 written by my captivating counterpart in Customer Experience, @ThomasEdghill  . New versions of ArcGIS Enterprise rely, in big part, on customer feedback. This can occur in many forms, but the most mainstream ways are by logging defects and enhancement requests through Technical Support, and logging ideas through Esri Community.

Thomas' blog goes over the main ideas that were implemented in this release, and I encourage you all to go through and read it, but here are some of the features that were added through your feedback:

1. ArcGIS Enterprise may now share content  to multiple ArcGIS Online organizations by pairing distributed and partnered collaborations
2. Administrative reports enable administrators to expose various usage statistics about your ArcGIS Enterprise organization's items and its members
3. Multifactor authentication is now supported for built in users
4. Federated ArcGIS Servers may now be assigned aliases to enable quick identification of which server does what

This is just a short list, there are many more to see, please take a look at the main blog if you are interested to see how we implement your ideas into the software.

General:

• How can I print from a web application?
  Use a print service.
• Where can I find one? or a free print service?
  https://youtu.be/TUHg7rgTRn4?t=441 
• If Esri provides a free print service, why do I need one?
  https://youtu.be/TUHg7rgTRn4?t=441 
• Is there any print service comes with ArcGIS Enterprise?
  https://youtu.be/TUHg7rgTRn4?t=713 
• how to publish from ArcGIS Pro?
  Share custom layouts for printing from ArcGIS Pro—Documentation (10.7) | Documentation for ArcGIS En... 
• Author layout templates in ArcGIS Pro
  https://youtu.be/TUHg7rgTRn4?t=1257 

How a print service works?

• https://youtu.be/TUHg7rgTRn4?t=369
• https://youtu.be/TUHg7rgTRn4?t=627 

Security:

• Print maps that contain secured services—Documentation (10.7) | Documentation for ArcGIS Enterprise 

What's new in printing service?

• Recent enhancements when you publish a print service from ArcGIS Pro
  https://youtu.be/TUHg7rgTRn4?t=149 
• New capabilities introduced in ArcGIS Enterprise 10.7.1
  https://youtu.be/TUHg7rgTRn4?t=369 

Few technical notes:

• What do I need to do to take advantages of new capabilities?
  • first, publish a print service from ArcGIS Pro
  • secondly, use a newer client app
    Enabling High-Quality Printing in Web Applications - YouTube 
• 3 tier approach for a print service
  https://youtu.be/TUHg7rgTRn4?t=182 
• What is the first step to debug a print issue?
  https://youtu.be/TUHg7rgTRn4?t=557 
• Print high quality output from a tiled cache map service
  https://youtu.be/TUHg7rgTRn4?t=1047 
• Export Web Map specs
  https://youtu.be/TUHg7rgTRn4?t=2354

Advanced - report, charts, map-series etc.

• What do I need to do to create reports?
  There are no out of box solution for them right now. Please read this blog to learn more on how to include reports.
  Print reports from ArcGIS Enterprise web apps 
• ArcPy opens up advanced capabilities
  Tutorial: Print a web map and export a vector output PDF document using ArcPy—Documentation (10.7) |... 

                Our IT services has deployed anti-ransomeware software (ARS).  ARS is an important tool to help protect our data from ransomware attacks.  The government of PEI was recently hit with a ransomware attack in February 2020.   

On April 7^th ARS was deployed on our network storage. Our data store, config store, file geodatabases and raster tile caches are stored on our network storage.  Coincidentally, we have noticed stability issues with the our ArcGIS servers through most of April.  On April 30^th the network storage team helped us identify a pattern that showed stability issues with the our ArcGIS Servers that coincided with the dates and times of events logged by the ARS software. 

Before I continue let me strongly state “There has NOT been a ransomware attack on our ArcGIS servers.”

We believe that normal ArcGIS Server operations might mimic ransomware activity.  This triggers the ARS software to log an event and then begin to take snapshots of our files on the network storage servers.  We suspect the snapshotting may be interfering with the normal operation of ArcGIS Server.  Some of our users have reported failed map service requests and we have witnessed missing raster map tiles in our tile cached basemaps.

Since April 30^th the Isilon server team has disabled the ARS snapshotting activity for our storage space on the network servers.  This appears to have improved the stability of our ArcGIS servers but we are continuing to closely monitor for problems.

If ARS has been deployed on your storage servers and you are having stability issues with ArcGIS Server you should dig a little deeper.  Have the ARS logs reviewed to see if they mention the ArcGIS Server admin account and see if the dates and times in the logs coincide with dates and time of ArcGIS Server problems.  Good luck!