As an organization administrator, you're responsible for configuring ArcGIS Online to meet your organization’s needs and structure during setup and as your requirements change, and to take advantage of new capabilities. It's equally important to regularly maintain members, items, and groups to keep your organization uncluttered and optimally useful for its members. Some of these maintenance tasks, including monitoring use, can help you get the most value from ArcGIS Online.
To ensure that important maintenance tasks can be accomplished, it is recommended that organizations have at least two administrators. There is no limit to the number of members who can be assigned the default administrator role. However, for security reasons, only assign this role to those who require the additional privileges associated with it.
Member strategies
The members of your organization are likely to change over time. Strategies for the following common member maintenance tasks are described below:
Invite members
As you roll out or expand access to ArcGIS Online to new members or groups of members, you will need to use the invite members workflow. You can invite and configure user settings individually or in a batch by uploading a .csv file.
When inviting and adding members, complete the following steps:
- Before inviting members, configure new member defaults to specify member properties such as user type, member role, groups, and member categories to assign to new members.For example, if credit budgeting is enabled for the organization, save time by specifying a default credit allocation for all new members. This provides some initial credits to new users without requiring you to manage each user's credits individually. You can adjust the default credits for specific members as needed. It's also a best practice to configure a set of baseline groups so new members have immediate access to relevant content without having to request it.
If your organization has set up categories for organizing members according to characteristics, such as department, location, and expertise, you can specify default member categories to assign to all new members. Member categories make it easier to find and manage members in the organization.
- During the invitation process, assign a role with privileges that provide the member access to relevant capabilities. For example, if the member needs to create content, ensure that they have create capabilities.
Note:
You cannot assign the default administrator role or a custom role with administration privileges during the invitation process. The role must be changed after the member has joined the organization.
Tip:
If you invite members with an email, their names appear under Pending Members until they accept the invitation. You can resend invitations as reminders if necessary.
Remove members
When members leave your organization, you'll need to remove their account and decide what to do with any add-on app licenses, content, or groups that they own. When you delete the member account, the member's licenses, items and groups are transferred to another member that you specify.
Transition to organization-specific logins
If your organization has existing ArcGIS accounts for members, you can change member login types to organization-specific logins (SAML logins or OpenID Connect logins). Organization-specific logins allow members to sign in to ArcGIS Online using the same logins they use to access your organization's internal systems.
Item strategies
The items in your organization will change over time. An item's information, status, and currency may need to be updated over its life cycle. Methods for the following common item maintenance tasks are described below:
- Identify old or unused items
- Find large hosted feature layers
- Update service URLs in a web map
- Update URLs for service or app items
- Migrate items between accounts
Identify old or unused items
Old and unused items consume storage space and can clutter search results. It’s recommended that you periodically review items. Unused and unneeded items can be deleted from the organization. Out-of-date items that are still relevant can be designated as deprecated.
To find the oldest, least frequently modified, or least viewed items in your content, groups, and organization, sort or filter items on the respective tab of the Content page. You can also create an item report showing all items in the organization and sort the report by Date Modified or Date Last Viewed.
Find large hosted feature layers
ArcGIS Online charges storage credits based on the amount of feature data stored. As an organization administrator, it's important that you monitor your stored content to ensure that storage is used effectively.
To view a list of your organization’s hosted feature layers by size, complete the following steps:
- Open the Organization page, and click Reports.
- Click Create report, and click Single report.
- Follow the steps to create a report and generate an item report.
- Download the report.
A .csv file is saved to your local machine.
- Open the .csv file, and save it as a Microsoft Excel file.
- In the Excel file, filter the Item Type column to show Feature Service items only, and sort by Feature Storage Size.
Size is reported in megabytes.
Tip:
To see the specific storage credit usage for all hosted feature layers in the organization, go to your organization's status dashboard, click the Storage tab, and set the Storage type filter to Feature > Database. The Items using the most storage credits table will update to show only hosted feature layers and the credits used for each.
Update service URLs in a web map
Web service URLs that are included in live web maps can change over time. During server migrations, the server name may change. Servers will be migrated to HTTPS as it becomes a web standard. You can update the URL referenced by web map layers using the Update references utility on the Settings tab of the web map's item page.
Note:
You can avoid having to update service URLs in web maps using canonical names, or CNAMEs, for your GIS server machines. CNAMEs are server name aliases that are added to your DNS by your IT department (such as myGISserver.m.com for 50.12.234.12). When a server is migrated to new hardware, you can update the CNAME reference to point to the new server; all service URLs will remain the same, so web map and other service references do not need to be updated.
Update URLs for service or app items
URLs for services hosted in ArcGIS Server and locally hosted web apps may change when servers are retired or renamed. You can update a URL reference to layer and web app items by updating the URL in the Data source utility on the Settings tab of the item page.
Migrate items between accounts
Many users will never need to use more than one ArcGIS account. However, as an organization administrator, there are situations in which you may need to copy maps or other items from one account to another.
You can use Change owner to transfer existing items from one account to another or adjust group ownership. The items remain in the same organization, which means all references and links between layers, maps, and apps are preserved, and everything continues to work as expected. Group membership can also be adjusted.
To transfer items and groups while deleting an account, choose a member from your organization to delete, and select the Transfer content and groups option.
Tip:
When migrating accounts with a large number of folders or groups, you can also use ArcGIS API for Python to expedite and maintain the folder structure in My content. Download the sample script.
Review group strategies
Curate featured content using groups and promote a set of groups as the organization’s Featured groups. (Assign this task to other staff if possible.) If your organization decides to use basemaps other than the default Esri basemaps, create and maintain a group for the basemap gallery.
Groups do not consume credits, but cleaning up groups may also help you clean up old content items that are consuming storage credits.
Identify stagnant groups or groups that are no longer in use, especially public and organizational groups.
To review group strategies, complete the following steps:
- Click Groups > My organization's groups to view your organization's groups, and reverse the sort order to list oldest groups first.
- Open each group, and view its Content tab to determine the most recently modified items.
- Open the item page for each item in the group, and review the item's Usage tab for activity statistics.
Monitor and report activity
It's also important to monitor metrics of your organization’s users and content. Some strategies to monitor and control your organization’s activities are described below.
Note:
ArcGIS Online stores usage data for the past two years only.
System usage
Organization administrators may find it useful to monitor some of the following basic statistics:
- Number of members, groups, and items (total and new)
- Most active users and most viewed items
- Users and groups with the most items
You can find this information on the Overview, Status dashboard, and Reports tabs of the organization page. Item reports illustrate how users are creating, using, and sharing geographic content. Member reports reveal how users are contributing to the organization.
Storage usage
An organization's storage and database resource needs can change over time. To get information about your organization's storage usage and limits, go to the Overview tab of the organization page, and click the Feature Data Store link. You can also create an item report with detailed storage information from the Reports tab of the organization page.
During periods of intensive query and editing workloads, you may want to upgrade to a Premium Feature Data Store to access dedicated database resources and increased storage for your organization. Visit the Esri store for pricing, performance information, and purchase details.
Credit usage
Each organization uses cloud resources differently, so each uses credits differently. Even heavy use of a cloud service often offers the best value. Rather than targeting all instances of heavy credit use as excessive, carefully evaluate reasons for usage. For example, identify duplicate efforts, redundant data, and the use of services or data that are also available locally by doing the following:
- Monitor credit usage weekly or monthly from the status dashboard. You can also go to the Reports tab of the organization page, and generate a credit report.
- Determine when additional credits are needed. For credit budgeting strategies, see the Understanding and managing credits in ArcGIS Online.
Identify and investigate unintended use of credits and suggest alternative solutions such as the following examples:
- Unnecessarily generated tile services—Use the option to generate tiles automatically only to generate tiles when they are first viewed by a viewer so you'll only be charged for generating tiles that are requested. If you'd rather generate your own tiles, build the tile cache in ArcGIS Pro (as a tile package), and upload and publish the tile package in ArcGIS Online.
- Large hosted feature services—Simplify geometries, reduce the number of attributes, or use a tile service to reduce the amount of hosted data that's stored. If you can support large datasets on your own infrastructure, consider publishing feature data to an ArcGIS Enterprise deployment.
- Duplicate layers—Search for layers to see whether they are already available before publishing. Use a hosted view to provide a different view of the data (fewer fields, specific features), without needing to store a duplicate set of data in ArcGIS Online.
- Large or repeated geocoding or routing jobs, or use of ArcGIS GeoEnrichment Service in the same organization—Discourage repeat geocoding of the same data. If a dataset has been created from an ArcGIS Online tool, encourage users to share the data instead of running duplicate jobs. You can also encourage the use of locators running on ArcGIS Server for repetitive jobs. Publish commonly used layers to the system and publicize them.