Latest Contributions by JoshuaBixby

‎03-30-2026

The risk of doing a frequent, deep-level service health check is that you will never let a service fully spin down. For example, if you had a dedicated service set to a minimum of 0 instances and maximum of 2 instances, a deep service health check (by deep I mean querying any data and not just looking at service REST info page) will force that service to spin up a instance/SOC. If the health checks are frequent enough, it will always have to keep an instance/SOC running. I worked for an organization once that used minimum instance 0 dedicated services to conserve resources for low usage GIS services. Someone on the business side created their own service health check script that checked every service deeply all at the same time. Effectively, the monitoring script because a form of service denial because it spun up every service, and the server was never resourced to handle having every service spun up at the same time. Make sure your monitoring doesn't become one of the biggest consumer of compute resources on your servers.

‎03-27-2026

You are confusing ArcGIS Server health with ArcGIS service health. The health of the ArcGIS Server application, the framework that runs everything, isn't directly tied to the health of an individual service. As pointed out by @A_Wyn_Jones , if you are concerned about a particular service you will need to query that service.

‎03-20-2026

The following is possibly overkill for your situation, but regular expression is the hammer I like to use on everything like a nail. 🙂 The following uses regex to extract all three numerical values in the text string, and then return one of them based on how the custom function is called. If the string field is NULL then NULL is returned. Expression Type: PYTHON3 Expression: extract_value(!text_field!, "total") Code Block: import re pattern = re.compile( r"(?P<acre>[\d,.]+)\s*ac\s*@@\s*\$" r"(?P<price>[\d,.]+)/ac\s*=\s*" r"(?P<total>[\d,.]+)" ) def extract_value(field, value): if field is not None: match = re.search(pattern, field) return match.groupdict()[value]

‎03-12-2026

You may be consulting for/on IT, but it is clear you have very limited knowledge of GIS, so the earlier comment about hiring a consultant still applies. ArcGIS Enterprise is a complex platform with many components. Which components get deployed and how depends on the businesses requirements, but having requirements means little if it isn't accompanied with understanding the product itself.

‎03-03-2026

Optimizing a map service starts in ArcGIS Pro. ArcGIS Enterprise uses the same rendering engines as ArcGIS Pro, so anything that is slow to open and slow to render in Pro will be slow to start and slow to respond in ArcGIS Enterprise. Taking ArcGIS Enterprise out of the equation to start helps focus on data and map structure issues that negatively impact performance. Once the map is opening and rendering quickly in Pro, then start looking at publishing it and potentially optimizing service-related settings.

‎02-25-2026

I think the better option would be not having such drastic character restrictions in the first place. Some of the existing restrictions feel like we are back in the 1990s, or at least early 2000s.

‎02-17-2026

Assuming you already have seen the following, so I am posting this for others that may find this question and am looking for "best practice" from Esri. From ArcGIS Enterprise implementation guidance—ArcGIS Trust Center | Documentation: Disable the ArcGIS Server Primary Site Administrator (PSA) account, and demote or delete the Portal for ArcGIS Initial Administrator Account (IAA). Disabling the default accounts ensures a singular access path for administrators identified in the enterprise identity store and provides additional accountability.

‎02-12-2026

You should reach out to your account representative. There is a lot of nuance around licensing, and most users here will only comment on technical matters and not licensing matters.

‎01-19-2026

This is exactly the reason we continue to deploy ArcGIS Web Adaptor both on-prem and in the cloud when upstream network devices could replace it. In large organizations, managing across silos always adds time and complexity to change management, and that is best case. Worst case, fighting personalities and silos can make for real headaches.

‎01-17-2026

Part of the reason Esri has moved away from documenting single-service recommendations like the old "n+1" limit is that any such recommendation is so generic that it isn't really applicable, or at least isn't really helpful. Unless your ArcGIS Server site only has a single service published, which I doubt very few do, how a single service is tuned really depends on all the services on the machine. A rule like "n+1" may be a reasonable suggestion in a vacuum, but what if you have published many heavily-used services and tuned them all the same way? It won't be pretty for any of the services when the machine is maxing out its CPU (and likely memory as well) because many heavily used services all have "n+1" max instances. Tuning an ArcGIS Server site has so many factors to consider that it is hard for single, simple suggestion to be made. Unless you are trying to maximize or optimize computing resources too eek every last penny out of some capital expense or monthly hosting bill, at the end of the day the most basic metric of whether a service is tuned well enough is whether you are getting complaints from users. Start with the defaults Esri provides and see what feedback you get from users.

‎01-07-2026

It is an implementation artifact, not an actual desktop license or feature type. You can think of it loosely as the license for the license manager itself, but even that isn't exactly correct.

‎12-31-2025

The answer to this need used to be ArcGIS Engine, but that product was never migrated to ArcGIS Pro runtimes, and now Esri is retiring it this March.

‎12-30-2025

@AliTalaat22 , wildcard behavior is fairly standard across programming/scripting languages and commands. Is there specific wildcard behavior that you are finding unexpected? If so, can you provide an example?

‎12-23-2025

Unfortunately, I can't re-link to the public defect listing because Esri appears to have yanked it from being publicly available. I have never had that happen before, where a defect is logged and made public and then Esri removes it from public view. Here is the defect and description: BUG-000181467: When running the updateFederatedServerUrl operation after changing the server Web Adaptor name, all feature services become inaccessible and are not updated.

‎12-19-2025

Not sure if the following is related, but our organization just logged the following defect a couple weeks ago: BUG-000181467 for Portal for ArcGIS

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My Ideas

Latest Contributions by JoshuaBixby

Re: ArcGIS GIS Server Health Check determination

Re: ArcGIS GIS Server Health Check determination

Re: Separate Numeric Part of Record into Separate Field

Re: New deployment GIS Enterprise 12

Re: Improve performance of MapService

Re: ArcGIS Portal: Enhancement to not accept passwords having special characters for the Initial Administrator Account

Re: Best method to change IAA and PSA passwords

Re: New test environment: portal and server licenses

Re: Can Azure Application Gateway Replace ArcGIS Web Adaptor Fully?

Re: Maximum number of instances: n+1?

Re: ArcGIS Concurrent (desktop) License Server - 'ACT' extension name meaning

Re: How to use ArcPy without installing ArcGIS

Re: Improve ArcPy List Functions Documentation: Explain Wildcard Position

Re: Update the organization URL in ArcGIS Enterprise 11.5 multimachine deployment

Re: Update the organization URL in ArcGIS Enterprise 11.5 multimachine deployment

Re: What is the fastest way to add a new machine t...

Re: ArcGIS Enterprise Kubernetes / GIS Functionali...

Re: What is the fastest way to add a new machine t...

Re: What is the fastest way to add a new machine t...

Re: Is there a way to add fonts to Portal?

Python Snippets

Esri Forestry Group (EFG)