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Debugging AGOL Hosted Services

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09-22-2020 10:33 PM
Status: Open
by Anonymous User
Not applicable

If you are a heavy user of AGOL you will no doubt have run into issue where things just don't work, stop working, and or just pretend to work. As professionals in the industry we normally try to resolve the issues by identifying what is going wrong. AGOL is probably the worst platform for giving you information about what has happened. Currently fiddler is our best tool to try and work out what is happening, there are no error logs, no useful error messages, and the ESRI support team also have very little in the way of tools to try and work out what went wrong.

In the Australian Region we have the added issue that we don't deal with ESRI Inc direct and have to go through our regional support team who have no access into the black magic that is the AGOL backend. This inevitably ends in long drawn out support tickets with lots of back and forth due to time zone differences and the standard support escalation process.

In my particular case I have a feature service that is no longer editable, which appears to be from features with invalid geometry. In theory this should not have been possible as they were published from an enterprise database. Apparently, the only way to resolve the problem is to overwrite the service. Which if anyone has offline workflows will know is not a simple and straight forward task. So now the choice to use AGOL now has resulted in unmanageable workflows, and very difficult trouble shooting.

What I propose is that the platform desperately needs a good robust debugging system. The key features required are:

  1. should not be available to the general user and should be reserved for Organisational Administrators Only.
  2. An ability to capture all the communication between the AGOL servers and the end user for a limited amount of time so as to no clog up servers.
  3. An ability to do data validation on data within the hosted environments to identify high risk records and resolve the issues before they break services.
  4. ability easily add ESRI support staff directly access to services, maps and apps, this would allow the support staff to view the map/data in question as user, manager, owner.
  5. better indications of the size of layers and what is taking up space (change tracking, offline replicas, editor tracking)
  6. ability to verify data and maps that have been taken offline are still on client devices or not.
  7. data auditing (which users have what data offline)
  8. Access to ArcGIS Enterprise level database tools for the AGOL Hosted datasets.