For this week's assignment, we're going to perform a few admistrative tasks to be sure our Server and Portal sites are running smoothly. Return to your AWS Console and start the EC2 instance you used in Lessons 2 - 4.
There a number of ways to access configuration options for ArcGIS Enterprise. Two of these options are via a web browser. Depending on how your Enterprise installation is configured, you may need to use a browser on the EC2 instance itself through a Remote Desktop connection rather than from your local computer. In these cases, administrative access has been disabled from remote client machines. This is a setting you could change on your server, as well as confirming the appropriate firewall ports are open. For now, visit these sites from a browser on your EC2 machine:
Let's explore the ArcGIS Server Manager site. Visit your Manager site with a url like, baxtergeog865####.e-education.psu.edu/server/manager.
Under the Services tab, you should see the various services you've created so far in the course lessons. Click the pencil icon next to one of your services to see the options you have to administer them. Explore the various sections by clicking the tabs along the left of the window. A few things to look for in particular:
Under the Site tab in the ArcGIS Server Manager, you'll see a few sub-sections that contain many of the properties of your Server's configuration. Among these are:
Another useful page on this site is the Software Authorization sub-section. Click that heading and you'll see the licensing information for you installation. This can be useful when determining when you need to renew licenses or remember which extensions you have access to.
Finally, click on the Logs tab of the ArcGIS Server Manager site.
The View Logs sub-section is a place you can go to view error logs generated by your ArcGIS Server. This can be a very useful place to look when services aren't working properly. You can change the level of log detail to view by changing the Log Filter dropdown; the Debug option will show you the most information. You can also change the way logs are generated and stored on your server by clicking the Settings button. The Debug option will result in the most comprehensive log files, which you can filter any way you'd like when viewing, but it's not recommended to leave your logs configured to Debug for very long because the log files stored on your server will get very large and take up a lot of space. But when troubleshooting a problem it's good practice to set the log setting to Degub temporarily to investigate the problem and to then revert it back to Warning or Severe afterwards to save space.
The Statistics sub-section is a very useful resource for monitoring the client usage of your server. You will see graphs of a few default reports on the statistics page that you can click and interact with. Click on the Total Requests for the Last 7 Days graph. You will see all of the services running on your server listed along the left. You can toggle the visibility of them individually to see their usage on the graph. You also have the option to specify the timeframe of the statistics report. Often, when running your own ArcGIS Server installation you will want to understand how your services are being utilized by clients, or you may need to generate numbers for other people in your organization to demonstrate the value of the services you provide. These dynamic graphs are a useful tool, and you may export the data as a .csv spreadsheet and extract information using a tool like Excel. Back on the main Statistics page, you can click the New Report button to create a custom view and save it as a thumbnail. You might create a custom report of a handful of your services and a relevant timeframe for your organization, maybe the last month, and export a report regularly to monitor usage over time.
You can also generate reports using a custom toolbox in ArcGIS Pro. This can be useful if you need to create a report that the web-based interface won't support. For example, the Statistics page in the ArcGIS Server Manager will only list a limited number of services in the toggle list. If you need to generate a report of more services, you'll need to run a custom tool in ArcGIS Pro to create and save the report. Below, we will see where custom reports are stored in the adminstrative section of ArcGIS Server.
Open a new browser tab and visit the ArcGIS Server Administrator Directory (baxtergeog865####.e-education.psu.edu/server/admin). Log in with your siteadmin credentials. I don't recommend making any changes here, but feel free to explore the various sections to see the types of information that's available.
From the root page, click on the usagereports link. You will see a list of some default reports; if you create custom reports using ArcGIS Pro, they will appear on this page. You have the option to export the data from any of these to an .html, .json, or .csv file.
Back on the root page, click on the System link. From here you can view the licensing information of your installation, web adaptor configurations, and the directories where logs, tile caches, and other files are stored, among other things. Click on the webadaptors link. You will probably only see one web adaptor, with a long alpha-numeric name, listed. Click on the web adaptor name and you'll see that it specifies the name of the machine, its IP address, and the port (80 or 443) that it uses. In a production setting, the web adaptor will specify the fully-qualified domain name (e.g., baxtergeog865####.e-education.psu.edu) of your server and its public IP address (your Elastic IP). Recall that the web adaptors link our ArcGIS sites with the machine's web server, which in our case is IIS (Internet Information Services). There will be a separate web adaptor configured for the server and portal portions of your site. In the cloud formation template, we specified a name for our server site ("server") and our portal site ("portal"). The cloud formation template didn't do that for us here (although our sites still work), but in a production setting, you will have web adaptors listed here that link both the server and portal urls to your installation.
Finally, let's open our web server to see that both the server and portal folders have been created for us. From the desktop of your EC2 instance, click the Start button and type IIS. Click on Internet Information Services Manager when it appears in the list. Expand your server to view the contents of the Default Web Site. You should see two virtual directories listed: server and portal.
Virtual directories link a url folder name to a physical folder location on our server. The urls for these two directories take the form:
Enter each of these in a new browser window and you will see that they take you to your server and portal sites. Back in IIS, right-click on either the portal or server virtual directory, choose Manage Application, and click Advanced Settings. You will see a path on your server's C: drive that contains the web content for each site. You can use Windows Explorer to browse to those folders and see their contents. In summary, the web adaptors link the two urls above to the virtual directories in the web server. When installing ArcGIS Enterprise in a production setting or using tools other than cloud formation, there is a post-install setup procedure to get this all configured. Esri provides documentation [2] detailing how that process works. Not something we want to mess with here, but something you'll need to do when configuring ArcGIS Enterprise in your production environment.