Implementing ArcGIS Blog

Optimizing the ArcSOC instance availability and utilization for your service is a good strategy for helping users obtain fast response times and lower wait times from their dynamic requests to your Site. It can also benefit server resource utilization like memory as the service is not running a lot of instances that it will never use.

But optimizing the minimum and maximum number of instances for your dedicated services is not a one-time job. Usage patterns of your services can change over time so the task of collecting this information is something that you will want and to revisit periodically as a GIS administrator.

Before diving into how to observe ArcSOC instance activity statistics, let’s review some of the key details of the two ArcSOC-based service types in ArcGIS Server and how they play into this discussion:

• Dedicated
• Shared

Table Of Contents

• ArcSOC Availability and Utilization
• Dedicated Instance Pool Services
• Limitations of Shared Instance Pool Services
• Configured ArcSOC Instance Availability vs Instance Demand
• ArcGIS Server Service Report
• Automating the Service Report Collection with Soccer
• Analyzing the CSV File
• Final Thoughts

GIS Enterprise Reporter now has a companion application “er_compare.exe” that allows you to compare two ArcGIS Enterprise systems.

Measured transaction throughput and response times are critical data of any ArcGIS Enterprise load test, but captured hardware utilization of the deployment machines provide vital information as well. Together, these test artifacts allow for the proper analysis of the capabilities and efficiencies of the Site.

Determining that an application or feature service has achieved a particular level of throughput is good, but confirming the scalability characteristics while also examining the captured processor utilization of the tested workload is even better.

This Article will discuss several ways to capture the machine hardware utilization. This resource usage is a great compliment to the results of an Apache JMeter load test of ArcGIS Enterprise and can help further the analysis. The Article will focus on the most common scenarios using free tools and utilities for Windows and Linux.

Table Of Contents

• Capturing Hardware Utilization During an Apache JMeter Load Test
• Capturing Strategies
  • What Information Should the Load Test Capture?
  • Sample Interval
  • The Difference Between Capturing and Monitoring
  • Test Clients (Load Generator Machines)
  • Understand Your Server Baselines
  • Common Utilization Capturing Examples
    • Using Perfmon (To Capture Utilization Outside of Load Test)
    • Using dstat (To Capture Utilization Outside of Load Test)
    • Using Apache JMeter (To Capture Utilization Directly From Load Test)
• The SampleWorldCities Test Plan With Metric Collection Support 
  • Components of the Test Plan
    • jp@gc - PerfMon Metrics Collector Extension
  • Validate the JMeter-to-ServerAgent Connectivity
• Test Execution
• General Methodology Guide
• Common Utilization Collection Challenges
• Final Thoughts

Looking for a quick way to summarize the details of all your ArcGIS Enterprise services? If so, then System Log Parser's ServiceDetails Analysis Type is highly recommended. This feature performs a scan of your Site through the REST Admin API and presents the gathered information into a spreadsheet report for easy digestion.

The report is a great resource to find details on your service provider statistics, service configuration info, or data source analysis.

The System Log Parser (SLP) utility is great for being able to analyze many different "ArcGIS Enterprise" log sources to help quantify the usage of your Site. It is free and includes an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) called SystemLogsGUI.exe. But, did you know it can also be run from the command line via the slp.exe that is included with the download?
Command line capable execution makes a good fit for automation through PowerShell or good old fashioned bat scripts.

The slp.exe executable includes all of the same capabilities. However, you can override many of the limits imposed by the GUI such as: the end time and start time. You can even access features that are not available from the GUI like: searching with specific UTC dates, customizing the name of the report, and enabling the application debug log (for troubleshooting).

The GIS Enterprise Reporter provides a wide variety of information about the services in ArcGIS Enterprise.  This article describes the information gathered by GIS Enterprise Reporter and how to understand it.

Although you are probably familiar with using System Log Parser (SLP) to read logs and help you quantify your ArcGIS Enterprise usage, there is a relatively new feature in this popular, free utility that can make the effort easier and the analysis more powerful. 

The new feature, commonly referred to as the Optimized report in System Log Parser, allows you perform log queries of much larger time spans. In addition, it can perform the parsing faster and with tremendous memory savings over the classic analysis types (e.g. Simple, WithOverviewCharts and Complete).

The Optimized option still generates a spreadsheet-based report statistically summarizing the collected log information into key time focused categories. 

Resources for planning the virtualization of ArcGIS Pro.

The Architecture Practice team in Professional Services have been writing articles to assist the community to plan, design and deploy ArcGIS Enterprise. This purpose of this page is to be a single resource to all these blogs and will be updated as new posts are created.

This is the second article in the GIS Enterprise Reporter series.  The focus of this article is to offer a bit of guidance for running the application.