Notebook Server....what have I gotten myself into? =]

[awgeezrick]

Good Morning/Afternoon,

Well, finally got Notebook Server up and running on our enterprise portal (11.1). I was super excited as I feel that Notebook Server will be beneficial for some of our specific users. My excitement dwindled a bit when I first started to play around with my first Notebook.... =[ The reason being that I went into it thinking it would operate just list a notebook in ArcPro. But it doesn't.

- If I want to use arcpy I need the Advanced License (well played ESRI)

- I can't access files on my local machine because the 'local machine' is in fact the Notebook server itself (which I should have realized earlier...my bad). However, I uploaded a csv file to the Portal, but could just access it via pandas in order to have the data in a dataframe (e.g. get the item via gis.contenet.get, then use pd.read_csv(item) to convert the item into a dataframe...Pandas doesn't recognize the item as a csv file).

- Due to the above I tried pointing to a csv file on a network drive I have access to, but that didn't work either; and I feel the reason for this is that the Notebook is being run as the Notebook Server Service Account (not my AD account...which has the permissions to access that data). And if this is the case...that sucks because giving the NB Server Service account access to my own data is one thing, but then having to grant it access to everyone in the Unit is something else entirely!! =]

Clearly I don't want to write the whole thing off, as there is still a part of me that knows there must be benefits to NB Server and all it has to offer. So, for those of you that have deployed NB Server in your Enterprise env, what benefits have you found? Are there any best practices or specific workflows that you've created that ensure your end user (yourself included) gets the most out of the product?

Any insight, guidance, etc, is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mark

[TomPaschke]

Hi @awgeezrick,

first at all, from my point, of view NB Server is a great tool and I use it as kind of a Swiss army knife for different tasks but primarily (near real-time) data integration, automation of administrative tasks and analysis workflows (mainly using the Spatially Enabled Data Frame capabilities). Regarding the license options, you not really expected to get something as powerful as arcpy for free with NB server, while it costs in either Pro or Server, did you ;)?

For accessing the CSV as an Item you just missed the .download() operation in order to convert it directly into a Pandas data frame:

In terms of a share drive, it's possible to mount share drives on the NB server and pass them through to the Docker container: https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/notebook/latest/administer/windows/configure-and-manage-arcgis-note.... Probably doesn't work for you, since I believe it's not possible to control access based on the named user.

Hope this is somewhat helpful.

Cheers,
Tom

[shikhar_deep]

Thanks @TomPaschke !

Hi @awgeezrick  you may find this useful "Import custom modules from a registered data directory"

https://enterprise.arcgis.com/en/notebook/latest/administer/windows/import-custom-modules-from-a-reg...

[awgeezrick]

Thanks Shikhar

[awgeezrick]

Thanks Tom, your solution to get the csv item into a dataframe was priceless. Greatly appreciated as well.

Mark