ArcGIS Governance in Education: Monitoring Usage and Health-checking your ArcGIS organization

[GeriMiller]

INTRODUCTION

As ArcGIS usage grows across educational institutions, it is important to establish processes and procedures for monitoring this usage. There are multiple reasons for doing so, such as:

• Illustrating the impact of GIS on the university’s educational and research mission.
• Communicating the growing breadth and depth of GIS use to university stakeholders responsible for funding.
• Maintaining and supporting institutional systems, like ArcGIS has become.
• Planning for future needs.
• Preventing potential storage or other related issues down the road.

Further, in addition to monitoring usage of ArcGIS, it is important to have procedures in place for health-checking your ArcGIS Online organization to support expansion or contraction planning, i.e. adding or removing storage, users, credits, etc., to ensure sustainable use. The notion of health-checking, which is periodically reviewing checklist of items as described below, is important to ensure optimal performance and uninterrupted service. 

This is part of a broader message of governance in Education - setting institution-wide standards and policies that apply to how ArcGIS is administered. A governance plan for managing ArcGIS can help institutions plan for growth and use resources effectively.

The purpose of this blog to focus specifically on monitoring usage and health-checking your ArcGIS Online organization periodically, and not to address everything that goes into a governance plan.

It is part of 5 blog series:

• Blog 1: Content and Storage Management
• Blog 2: Credit Management
• Blog 3: User Management and offboarding
• Blog 4: Monitoring Usage and Health-checking your ArcGIS organization
• Blog 5: Proactive Content Management by Users

MONITORING USAGE IN ARCGIS ONLINE – UNDERSTANDING

Understanding how your institution handles other technologies

Consult your IT colleagues/centralized IT support within your institution to evaluate whether existing monitoring practices for other systems (e.g., Sharepoint, Google Drive, DropBox, LMS such as Canvas, Blackboard, etc.) can be applied to ArcGIS.  

Some modifications may be required but you can leverage your colleagues’ expertise to build a strong foundation, as well as leverage existing investments in institutional monitoring systems (e.g., Zabbix).

Understanding how usage can be monitored

One way to understand and monitor how ArcGIS Online is used is to glean information from the ArcGIS usage dashboards. They provide administrators with tools to monitor and analyze various aspects of their organization's usage, such as checking feature data store usage level, tracking credit consumption, app usage, member activities, etc. More information here.

Examples of usage monitoring in Education

Another way to understand usage is to leverage a customized dashboard which could provide much easier visualization of named users and apps, and – when integrated with other institutional systems of record – provide additional information on usage across majors, degree programs, affiliation, etc., which go beyond what the ArcGIS Online Usage Dashboards provide. Below are examples of how several institutions have implemented their own dashboards to show the growing impact of ArcGIS across their respective communities.

• University of Michigan (this is main User Dashboard, check additional Data Store, Credit and Item Dashboards below as examples)
  • Data Store Dashboard (not all elements are publicly viewable)
  • Credit Dashboard
  • Item Dashboard
• UC Merced  
• UC Davis   
• Penn State
• University of Maryland
• The Claremont Colleges

MONITORING USAGE AND HEALTHCHECKS – BEST PRACTICES

The sections below outline options for monitoring usage and health-checking your organization.

Monitoring Usage

It is important to start collecting data now, or as soon as possible, to be able to develop a historical record that can help with predicting future growth trends.

Refer to the following GIS for Everyone (...and how to build your own ArcGIS Dashboard to show it!) blog, which details how to build your own usage dashboard (similar to the University of Michigan dashboard and others above), including a Jupyter notebook that can be leveraged as a starting point. Alternative approach is shared here by Claremont Colleges. 

Health-checking your ArcGIS Online organization

Periodic checking of your ArcGIS Online organization is recommended to ensure optimal use of the system – recommendation is to do this once per semester or at least once per year. 

• Review Feature Data Store usage, regularly visit Organization dashboard (OrganizationàOverview page)
  • Monitor storage usage and resource usage to anticipate the need to upgrade, or to take other actions, in order to sustain a reasonable user experience.
• Review storage, run Item report
  • Refer to ArcGIS Governance in Education: Content and Storage Management blog
• Review credits, run Credit report
  • Refer to ArcGIS Governance in Education: Credit Management blog
• Review named users, delete if necessary
  • Refer to ArcGIS Governance in Education: User Management and offboarding blog
• Ensure your Administrator contacts are up to date 
  • Refer to Know who holds the keys: Review your organization administrators blog
• Ensure you have more than one Administrator.
  • It is important to have more than one administrator assigned to each subscription.  Esri has increased security within ArcGIS Online to meet FedRAMP certifications and as a result, Esri can no longer easily add new administrators on behalf of an institution.  For example, if your administrator leaves and if you do not have a backup, there is an involved process that will need to be followed to add an administrator.  This process will include a letter with C Level executive signature approving of the change.  This process could take time and resources to complete, resulting in significant delay in service interruption.
  • Refer to the Write an ArcGIS Online Admin Change Letter of Authorization article for steps to follow if your administrator leaves and you have no way to get in touch with them.
• Review permissions for team members who manage ArcGIS
  • Review your My Esri contacts for proper permissions. Make sure permissions are set correctly and they are current.  
  • Verify Authorized Support Callers are still accurate.

CONCLUSION – NEXT STEPS AND WHERE TO GO FOR HELP

Invariably, there is complexity associated with the various options above. What is important is that good stewardship of resources is maintained. The most important takeaway from this blog is to start proactively monitoring usage of your organization and performing health-checks periodically.

Some of the solutions above will continue to evolve, and we’d like you to be part of this journey – a contributor with ideas, processes and workflows.

Please share any comments and feedback here. If you have a workflow in place that has worked, we’d like to hear it.

For any additional questions, please contact your Account Manager or highered@esri.com.