When a public-facing GIS application slows down, users notice immediately. Administrators, however, often don’t see the warning signs until performance issues have already begun affecting staff and the public.
For many state and local governments, the challenge isn’t expertise or effort, it’s visibility. Without real-time insight into ArcGIS Enterprise performance, even well-managed systems can be difficult to monitor proactively.Â
This was the case for Orange County, Virginia, which relies on a robust ArcGIS Enterprise environment to support both internal operations and high-traffic public applications.Â
The Challenge: Identifying Performance Bottlenecks in Real Time
Orange County, Virginia maintains a large ArcGIS Enterprise deployment with numerous services running concurrently. While most services experience moderate usage, one parcel service receives the majority of incoming requests and supports a heavily used public-facing application. Over time, this service began exhibiting long load times, request timeouts, and inconsistent performance, issues that directly impacted staff workflows and the public user experience.Â
When problems surfaced, troubleshooting required Orange County’s GIS Administrator to manually review ArcGIS Server logs and interpret error messages after the fact, often under pressure. What the county needed was a way to understand system behavior as issues were unfolding, not hours later.Â
That’s where Blue Raster came in.Â
The Solution: Purpose-Built Monitoring with ArcGIS Monitor
Blue Raster partnered with Orange County to implement ArcGIS Monitor with a focus on turning raw system metrics into actionable insight. Rather than overwhelming the GIS administrator with data, the goal was to surface the information that mattered most, clearly and immediately.Â
Together, we designed a series of custom dashboards and analysis views aligned with how the county actually operates. These views were built to quickly answer essential questions:Â
- Are services responding normally?Â
- Is the infrastructure under strain?Â
- Is our most important service being overwhelmed?Â
To support this, the solution included multiple tailored views, each with a clear purpose:Â
- Infrastructure analysis views showing host CPU usage, memory utilization, storage usage, and overall network activity.Â
- Performance views tracking running service instances, response times, and failed requests.Â
In addition, custom indicators and alerts were configured to flag site outages, connectivity issues, service degradation, and infrastructure stress, bringing attention to potential problems before they escalated into outages.Â
The Result: Proactive Monitoring and Faster Response
By tailoring ArcGIS Monitor to Orange County’s specific priorities, Blue Raster helped transform monitoring from a reactive task into a strategic capability. The county now has greater confidence in its ArcGIS Enterprise environment, faster troubleshooting workflows, and improved support for the mission critical services relied on by both internal staff and the public.Â
Added Benefit: Monitoring Against County SLAs
Like many local governments, Orange County, Virginia needed a clear, defensible way to measure system uptime against established service-level agreements (SLAs). The county maintains an internal requirement that its ArcGIS Enterprise environment achieve greater than 95% uptime, with performance reviewed on both a monthly and annual basis.Â
As part of the ArcGIS Monitor implementation, Blue Raster configured a custom indicator to track total downtime in minutes and automatically calculate uptime percentages over time. This approach eliminates manual log reviews and provides the GIS Administrator with a clear, at-a-glance view of system availability and historical trends.
The result is improved transparency, stronger accountability, and increased confidence that ArcGIS Enterprise performance consistently aligns with county standards and expectations.Â
Ready to Optimize Your ArcGIS Enterprise Environment?
Blue Raster helps state and local governments like Orange County, Virginia gain clarity and control over their ArcGIS Enterprise environments.
Whether you’re managing dozens of services or a single mission-critical application, we can help you monitor smarter, respond faster, and plan more effectively.Â