I don't want to speak for @RachaelHarbes, but I've seen some of Rachel's other posts (including commenting on one of the ideas I've created related to this), so I think we're on the same page and would love to provide some input on this, because this is something I've been wanting/needing for a long time.
For traditional/referenced feature services:
When the feature service item exists in Portal, but not on Server (maybe because someone deleted directly in Server Manager). That feature service item is essentially orphaned, and it would be nice to have some sort of functionality to determine what feature service items in Portal do not have the associated feature service on Server. Another example of when this occurs is when the feature service fails to publish. It will sometimes create a feature service item in Portal with the feature service name and the date after it (FeatureServiceName_20250402). But the underlying feature service in Server doesn't exist. Of course it's easy enough to delete it manually, but it would be nice to generate a report of all the "orphaned" feature service items in Portal that do not have the associated feature service in Server.
For hosted feature services:
We interact with the ArcGIS Data Store directly (read only) to ETL data out of it. Like Rachel, we connect to it through PGAdmin and we're able to see the actual PostgreSQL table names and data. And at least for us, we're able to associate table names with the corresponding hosted feature service either by name (usually, the table name corresponds with the S123 name if the hosted feature service is created through S123), or if we have to, just correspond the number of records/schema with the hosted feature service in Portal.
The problem is that those tables sometimes become orphaned. While it is usually pretty rare, it has happened to us in three scenarios:
- Republishing an existing S123 form that requires the tables to be dropped and re-created (because of a schema change). Sometimes it doesn't actually drop the table, it just creates a new one.
- Deleting a hosted feature service. Sometimes it only deletes the hosted feature service item in Portal, but not the actual table in the data store.
- When the hosted feature service item in Portal becomes corrupted. One time, we disabled and reenabled sync on a hosted feature service, and that completely corrupted the item (was not able to load any data in the hosted feature service). However, the underlying table in the Data Store still existed.
So in those three cases, they become orphaned and it unnecessarily occupies space on our Data Store machine. The only way to delete them is to delete them directly in PGAdmin. Most of our hosted feature services are created from S123, and most of those include photo attachment tables, so spaces accumulates quickly.
My current process of checking these things is very......manual and time consuming. So having some sort of tool that can find these orphaned items/tables would be very helpful for me. We're on ArcGIS Enterprise 11.2.
