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Introduction to ArcGIS Monitor

ArcGIS Monitor is an enterprise-grade monitoring solution that works with ArcGIS Enterprise by providing information about system health, usage, and performance. It captures key metrics and attributes to quantify system health over time, helping you maximize your GIS and IT investment. Monitor also aggregates system-level data into actionable information to help identify problems before they affect users and raises awareness to operations teams. This information can also be used by GIS administrators to maintain the operational health and performance of your enterprise GIS implementation or by managers to analyze long-term trends.

Software architecture

Monitor consists of a server, optional agents, and the Monitor database. This structure offers flexibility when monitoring ArcGIS Enterprise deployments across physical, remote, and cloud environments.

ArcGIS Monitor Server is the central hub for data collection and analysis. It provides a web interface that allows you to configure settings, manage users and permissions, configure monitoring, view and respond to alerts, and analyze monitored environments.

ArcGIS Monitor Agent extends Monitor into distributed network environments. It can be deployed in remote data centers and cloud environments to enable local monitoring. Data collected by Monitor Agent is sent to the Monitor Server installation to which it is registered for centralized data reporting and analysis.

The Monitor database stores system settings and all data metrics. It is recommended that you create a dedicated database and user for Monitor. Once Monitor Server is connected to the database, it manages the creation of the ArcGIS Monitor Information Model and the maintenance of its schema.

Learn more about deployment scenarios and database system requirements

Roles

Roles in Monitor are configured to allow for varying degrees of access in Monitor depending on each user’s duties in an organization. Depending on the size of the organization, these roles may be performed by one user or several users. Monitor includes the following purpose-built roles:

Administrator—An administrator can manage Monitor system settings, users, and all aspects of monitoring an enterprise GIS implementation.

Manager—Managers can manage all aspects of monitoring an enterprise GIS implementation but don't have access to Monitor system settings or the ability to add and manage users.

Viewer—Viewers can view alerts and analyze long-term trends within an enterprise GIS implementation. Viewers can't register components, make changes to monitoring, or change Monitor system settings.

Learn more about controlling access in Monitor

Essential terminology

The following is a list of essential Monitor terminology:

Alerts

Alerts serve as the primary method for tracking the health, usage, and performance of registered components. Alerts are created for registered components when their metric values fall outside of alert rule threshold values that you specify. When an alert is created, its status and state appears on the Alerts page.

Analysis

Analysis allows you to create views that help answer broad, large-scale questions about the overall health, usage, performance, and inventory of an organization's enterprise GIS implementation. Analysis views can also be used to identify specific issues and identify correlations between key data, such as related alerts and metric values.

Collections

Collections are groups of components that you create to organize components into logical groups that serve as the foundation for metric data analysis, service level agreement calculations, notifications, and incidents. Collections can be created for specific environments, such as production, staging, or development, and for specific types of components, such as databases, hosts, or ArcGIS software. You can also create notifications and webhooks for collections and enable feature services to make collection data available for use in other ArcGIS applications, such as ArcGIS Dashboards.

Components

Components are the hardware and software resources that make up your enterprise GIS implementation. When components are registered, they are actively monitored at set intervals. Each component contains attributes and metrics specific to its type, and some components contain subcomponents. For example, an ArcGIS Enterprise portal contains a GIS server and has web services.

Incidents

Incidents can be used to schedule maintenance tasks, declare unscheduled outages, and annotate periods of system instability for a collection of monitored components. Reminder emails can be configured and sent to the collection's subscribed users to notify them of incidents, and monitoring and alerting can also be turned off for scheduled incidents.

Observers

Observers are background processes that are responsible for collecting attribute and metric data for registered components. Each component type has a unique set of observers that monitor critical aspects of the component.

Metrics

Metrics are properties with corresponding numerical values that can be used to track various aspects of an environment and its components over time. Alert rules can be individually configured for a component's metrics to notify Monitor administrators when metric values are operating outside of a predefined set of threshold values.

Notifications

Notifications inform users of specific events and changes to the monitored environment, such as an alert for low system resources on a host component or an upcoming incident for scheduled maintenance. You can subscribe to Monitor resource events, events for any resource across the monitored environment, or events for a single collection and send notifications about those events via email or webhooks.

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