Geography Network Canada - Ensuring ArcIMS server uptime and gaining usage insight

Available to people around the world, ESRI Canada hosts The Geography Network Canada portal and the vast amount of data to which it provides access. The Geography Network Canada portal is an online resource for finding and sharing Canadian geographic content, including maps and data from many leading data providers. It provides the infrastructure for the sharing of geographic information between data providers, service providers, and users around the world. At any given time as many as 1000 users access between 90 and 100 map services. To ensure the availability of the Geography Network Canada portal, ESRI Canada leverages Geocortex Uptime and Geocortex Statistics.

The Challenges

The Geography Network Canada deploys about 50GB worth of data—a challenge for any administrator to manage. ESRI Canada strives to ensure that map services are constantly available and that map services are of interest to their users. ESRI Canada wanted to gain a clearer perspective of their users and hoped to find some way of reducing the administrative burden associated with maintaining the content resources. Geography Network Canada content is comprised mainly of maps and spatial information. In trying to determine their ’true’ traffic levels, ESRI Canada found that traditional web statistics software offerings proved ineffective at being able to provide accurate enough information on how their server was being used. They realized that it was because traditional web statistics software is designed to analyze data from a web server as opposed to analyzing data from a spatial data server.

Depended on by a variety of users, the Geography Network Canada portal is powered by ArcIMS and ArcSDE. ESRI Canada was looking to enhance and extend some of their core administrator functionality to ensure maximum availability for the web portal’s services. In particular, administrators at ESRI Canada were looking for automatic alerts whenever the site became unavailable or when map/image rendering times exceeded preset thresholds. Additionally, ESRI Canada was looking to augment existing methods already in place for determining when upgrades to the ArcIMS/ArcSDE infrastructure were required. Historically, they had primarily relied upon feedback that came from users who would contact them with concerns about not being able to access a particular service or when rendering a particular map was slower than expected.

The Solution

After examining a number of options ESRI Canada selected Geocortex Uptime and Geocortex Statistics from Latitude Geographics, an ESRI Canada Business Partner. Geocortex Uptime provided tools that enhanced and extended ArcIMS administrative functionality, and helped ensure maximum site availability by constantly monitoring ArcIMS map services, servers, and related resources. Geocortex Statistics analyzed ArcIMS log files and generated reports that provided valuable feedback which helped ESRI Canada understand what geographic areas within each map service were most popular with users.

“Geocortex Uptime is very good at notifying us whenever an issue occurs and can automatically initiate the troubleshooting process”, notes Peter Kovalchuk, GIS Web and Data Analyst, ESRI Canada, “and if we want, we can allow it to take automatic corrective action.” Geocortex Uptime has also provided a number of site administration tools that have streamlined the management of the Geography Network’s many ArcIMS Mapservices.

Geocortex Statistics has helped ESRI Canada staff make better decisions about the Geography Network infrastructure. “Geocortex Statistics helped diagnose and improve the performance of our ArcIMS applications by giving us valuable information about our infrastructure and how map services are delivered,” explains Chris North, Director of Technology and Client Support, ESRI Canada “The automatic alerts we received helped us clear some bottlenecks by letting us know when map rendering times were in excess of our thresholds.”

Geocortex Statistics helped identify that an ArcIMS server needed to be configured differently. An adjustment was made to the server architecture that significantly increased performance.

Chris North noted that he discovered an unexpected benefit of the software. He’d been working to build consensus to upgrade portions of the ArcIMS architecture which support the Geography Network Canada. He wanted to provide funders with substantive evidence to support the upgrades, but he was having trouble figuring out how to quantify it. Chris North turned to the comprehensive spatial report generation capabilities in Geocortex Statistics to present a compelling business case.

“The information that the software provided greatly supported my business case because it enabled me to provide more than just anecdotal evidence on perceived performance to senior management” said Mr. North. “Geocortex Statistics gave me the hard numbers I needed to plug into my business case.”

With Geocortex Statistics, ESRI Canada was able to gain insight into how people interact with the Geography Network Canada portal. The results of this analysis helped them trim unnecessary content from the web portal, lessening administrative burden.

“I am delighted with the enhanced functionality in the Geography Network Canada portal” said Peter Kovalchuk “The contributions that Geocortex Statistics and Geocortex Uptime provide help me do my job more effectively.”

The spatial analysis capabilities of Geocortex Statistics allowed ESRI Canada to generate reports that identify how the spatial information on their server was utilized as opposed to standard statistics software where they only identify the number of times a particular web page is accessed. Geocortex Uptime and Geocortex Statistics software modules drilled down further and more clearly identified the needs of their users and gave them enhanced tools to deliver services more efficiently.

So beneficial was the software, that ESRI Canada has entered into an agreement with Latitude Geographics to distribute Geocortex Uptime and Geocortex Statistics.

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