Hi Shannon,
Our main goal for tracking usage is to identify who is using it and how they are using it, both to offer support and guidance, where needed, as well as to understand the benefits of Notebooks in ArcGIS Online for our users. It is also important to understand usage in terms of how Notebook will need to be treated and justified as a potential additional cost to using the Esri platform in our organization.
For our purposes it is key that usage information be provided:
- per user -- We need to join the usage information to data from other enterprise systems and directories to form a full picture, such as a user's role (faculty, staff, student), enrollment (what classes are they currently taking?), degree program (what's their major?), and so on...
- per offering -- The three flavors Notebooks currently come in, Standard, Advanced, Advanced with GPU, (and their versions) to help ensure some of the comparisons we make will be done apples to apples.
- per time -- Users association over time can change. Being able to extract time-range snapshots of usage information will help us understand use cases tied to specific periods of time (e.g., a specific course a student might have taken, participants in a Data Science workshop series.)
The kind of usage information we would like to have on those basis are:
- time of use -- How long was a user using a particular Notebook type over a particular period of time.
- credits -- Same as for time. I'm sure there will be a costing structure that relates time of use and credits, however, since that costing structure will likely evolve over time, it is important to track the two separately, so that we have a route to make apples to apples comparisons. Plus, there will presumably be credits used when running analysis, accessing premium data, etc., in addition to the credits consumed running the Notebooks themselves.
Related to our thinking about what we would like see for usage tracking is the expectation that the same ArcGIS Online credit allocation will serve as a limit on Notebook usage, as it does for other aspects of ArcGIS Online. We have too many users, with too much variation in needs, to micro manage individual users' credit usage. We count on the credit allocation to serve as protection for users from mistakes like endless loops, and to guide them to seek advice where there might be a better, more economical alternative approaches to achieving their goals.
Hope that helps!
-peter
