ArcGIS Enterprise Stable?

[Joshua-Young]

I thought it might be beneficial to hear other people's (including Esri's) thoughts on the quality and stability of the code powering ArcGIS Enterprise. There are two main reasons I bring this up. One is my organization is still trying to recover the full functionality of our ArcGIS Enterprise site after upgrading from 10.6 to 10.6.1 about a month ago. This will be the third time we have upgraded Portal for ArcGIS, ArcGIS Server, and ArcGIS Data Store. Each upgrade has had issues (mostly with ArcGIS Server). Fortunately up until now, we have been able to fix whatever was broken during the upgrade.

The second reason is how the new versions of Insights for ArcGIS and ArcGIS Enterprise 10.6.1 have been released. ArcGIS Enterprise 10.6.1 was released in July, but a compatible version of Insights for ArcGIS was not release until this week. The only warning not to upgrade was a generic note in the ArcGIS Enterprise 10.6.1 help documentation to make sure you have compatible versions of Workforce and Insights before upgrading. While Workforce help documentation told which versions of Workforce were compatible with which versions of ArcGIS Enterprise up to 10.6.1, the Insights help documentation was not updated for 10.6.1. You had to find a post here on GeoNet to know for sure that Insights 2.3 was incompatible with Enterprise 10.6.1. Move on to the release of Insights 3.0 and now Esri has a warning on the download page to still hold off on upgrading because now ArcGIS Enterprise 10.6.1 will need to be patched for Insights 3.0 to work correctly. Unfortunately, the needed patch is not available yet. My problem with this whole scenario is not that the initial releases of ArcGIS Enterprise 10.6.1 and Insights 3.0 were not in sync, my problem is how poorly the situation was communicated to customers. An email, a blog post, or at least a tweet to let customers know that if you are using those products that you need to wait to upgrade would have been great.

Personally I would like to see a quality improvement release over a new features and functionality release, and an emphasis on ArcGIS Enterprise components being compatible with the current release of ArcGIS Enterprise. We have been using what is now called ArcGIS Enterprise for two years and are getting closer to moving most of our users off of ArcMap. So we now have lots of content and users on ArcGIS Enterprise, but now every upgrade makes me worry that it will cause us to have to rebuild from the ground up (well from backup at least).

[Joshua-Young]

So I fixed the issue this morning. I came across this post, Problem publishing to hosting server Portal 10.6.1, and I took Alex's advice of manually restarting the PublishingTools and PublishingToolsEx services. I did not do his first two suggestions because I didn't want to mess with our Data Store. I have manually stopped/started the PublishingTools service since this issue, but I never noticed that the PublishingToolsEx is only accessible from the Server Admin site, so I had not restarted that service.

Manually stopping/starting the PublishingToolsEx fixed the issue.

I still question the stability of ArcGIS Enterprise, especially the upgrade process, because as I mentioned earlier I have never had a smooth upgrade experience with the ArcGIS Server part of ArcGIS Enterprise. The keystore is corrupted by the upgrade every single time, system or utility services are missing or not working properly, and I had to manually rename a file to finally get the "Continue Upgrade" button to show up to finally upgrade our config-store for the first time in three versions.

I know this sounds like I don't like Esri software, but I really do appreciate everything that is possible with Esri's software when it is working properly. It is amazing what we can do with maps now and how much easier it is to get the right maps to the right people. I just would like to see a release or two from Esri that is not focused on new features, but improving the quality of what we already have and providing a better foundation for future functionality.

[JonathanQuinn]

Glad it's sorted out, but strange fix. As far as I know, (haven't set it up to check network traffic), clients such as Esri Maps for Office make initial connections to Portal to determine if it supports hosted services. I wouldn't expect them to connect directly to the Server and check either Publishing Tools, but it would have been interesting to see what the traffic looked like to return the error you saw.

In terms of the upgrade issues, I know there's ongoing investigation into the Continue Upgrade problem. It seems it's random and difficult to reproduce consistently in-house. I'd suggest the next time you need to upgrade, contact Support and have them give you steps on capturing as much information as possible for the upgrade. It's difficult to investigate retrospectively, so if they can make sure the environment is set up to get as much info out of it as possible, that may help diagnose the problem.

[WenfengLi]

I agree that the communication of releasing Portal 10.6.1 and Insights 3.0 can be improved. Implementation of the Portal is not a simple software installation. There are so many considerations, configurations, components and steps can go wrong. Perhaps we tend to under estimate the complexity of the implementation in an organization. In my case, it created a big challenge for me to manage the expectations of the decision makers.

[Joshua-Young]

Well the fun is not over for me yet . I don't know when it happened after the upgrade, but now all my previously published hosted feature layers and views are no longer recognized as being hosted by Portal. The options for hosted feature layers on the items Overview, Data, and Settings pages are missing. Portal is treating them as a standard feature service. ArcGIS Server on the other hand still thinks they are hosted services and will not let me configure the services. The old hosted feature layers and views are running just fine and seem to have their previous settings still applied (editing enabled or disabled is still applied correctly).

Host feature layers published after restarting the PublishingToolsEx are displaying the correct options on the settings page and I have the option to create hosted feature layer views.

Of the 3 upgrades to our setup over the last 2 years, this upgrade from 10.6 to 10.6.1 by far the most troublesome upgrade yet.

[Joshua-Young]

I know this thread is old but just in case others are having the issue of hosted feature services being in a hybrid state where ArcGIS Portal thinks the service is a standard feature service but ArcGIS Server thinks it is a hosted feature service. In troubleshooting a different issue I stumbled upon a solution that worked for me.

In the Contents directory of ArcGIS Portal every item has a iteminfo.xml file associated with it. This is apparently the magical secret spot where Esri marks a feature service as a hosted feature service. In the "<typekeywords>" section make sure there is a typekeyword set as "<typekeyword>Hosted Service</typekeyword>". That is all I had to do. I did not have to restart any services or processes, I just had to refresh the item page in ArcGIS Portal and there were all the settings and options for hosted feature services again. Creating views and changing settings are available again and work.

I still wish I knew why the 10.6 to 10.6.1 upgrade stripped the "Hosted Service" typekeyword from ALL the hosting feature services that existed at the time of the upgrade. A year and a half of hosted feature services were rendered unmanageable because of that bug.