ArcGIS organization management, whether in ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise, means juggling many moving parts. Users, licenses, content, groups, and credits change constantly, and keeping everything aligned requires more than one-time setup or occasional cleanup. Many organizations invest time defining Web GIS governance policies, but they often struggle to put those policies into practice. Without regular visibility into how people actually use the organization, even a well‑intentioned ArcGIS environment can quickly become unstructured and difficult to manage.
To help close that gap, we created ArcGIS Admin Insights, a toolkit designed to support Web GIS governance in ArcGIS Online through regular monitoring and visibility. Built using ArcGIS Notebooks and ArcGIS Dashboards, the toolkit surfaces actionable insights about an organization’s users, content, and groups. These insights help administrators understand whether governance policies are being followed and where intervention may be needed. By providing ongoing visibility into organizational health and usage, the toolkit supports the Observability pillar from Esri’s Architecture Center.
What the Toolkit Provides
ArcGIS Admin Insights leverages the ArcGIS API for Python to power a set of dashboards that surface insights across three key areas of ArcGIS organization management: users and licenses, content, and groups. Together, these dashboards help administrators understand how their organization is being used day to day, not just how it was configured.
The toolkit complements the new Credits Dashboard (beta) available in ArcGIS Online, giving administrators a more complete picture of organizational activity and resource usage. Some of you may also recognize this pattern from the earlier blog Managing ArcGIS Online content with ArcGIS Dashboards and ArcGIS Notebooks. ArcGIS Admin Insights builds on that foundation by expanding the approach beyond content to support broader organizational monitoring and ongoing observability.
Users & Licenses: The Users and Licenses dashboard provides visibility into how an ArcGIS organization’s users are structured and how they are being used over time. You can use this dashboard to identify inactive or underutilized accounts, validate that licenses are assigned efficiently, and spot trends that may signal the need to adjust onboarding processes, licensing strategy, or user management policies.
Content: The Content dashboard helps you understand what content exists across the organization and how it is being used. It highlights stale or unused items, supports validation of sharing and metadata standards, and tracks the growth of non‑authoritative content. You can also monitor high‑impact items (publicly shared, highly viewed, or large content), and explore upstream and downstream content dependencies.
Groups: The Groups dashboard provides insight into how groups are being used to organize content and manage access across the organization. It helps identify groups that support critical sharing workflows, surface unused or low‑value groups (such as empty or single‑member groups), and validate that group sharing settings align with organizational access and collaboration policies.
How It Works
ArcGIS Admin Insights brings these dashboards together using an ArcGIS Experience Builder app, which serves as a single storefront for exploring users, content, and groups in one place.
Each dashboard is powered by a shared hosted feature service that maintains an inventory of users, content items, and groups. This feature service is updated by a notebook that uses the ArcGIS API for Python to collect details about each user, content item, and group in your organization. You can schedule this notebook to run regularly to keep the dashboards up to date.
The toolkit was built using ArcGIS Online, but the same approach can be adapted for deployment in ArcGIS Enterprise with minimal changes.
Getting Started
Here’s the basic workflow to set up ArcGIS Admin Insights in your organization:
- Access the initialization notebook at ArcGIS Admin Insights – Initialization Notebook. If not already, log in to your organization in order to open the notebook.
- With the initialization notebook now open, choose the Save As option to store it as an item in your organization.
- Run all cells in your copy of the initialization notebook
- Once complete, take note of the
CLONED ITEMS SUMMARYthat is returned after the last cell. This lists the five new items created in your content. You will input the item ID of the data table in step 9 below. - You should now see five new items in your content:
- If you access the dashboards at this point, they will be empty! This is expected behavior. You need to create a copy of the inventorying notebook to populate the underlying data table.
- Access the inventorying notebook at ArcGIS Admin Insights – Organization Inventory Notebook. If not already, login to your organization in order to open the notebook.
- With the inventorying notebook now open, choose the Save As option to store it as an item in your organization.
- Open your copy of the inventorying notebook and update the
fs_idvariable to the new data table item id generated when you ran the initialization notebook in step 4 above. - Run all cells in your copy of the inventorying notebook.
- The underlying data table should now be updated, and the ArcGIS Admin Insights app loads as expected! You can consider scheduling the inventorying notebook to run weekly to observe your organization closely.
Road Ahead
Good governance is an ongoing practice. We hope this toolkit gives your team a practical foundation for observing and managing your ArcGIS organization with confidence.
Work on ArcGIS Admin Insights is ongoing. A few planned updates include easier deployment in ArcGIS Enterprise organizations, support for monitoring multiple organizations, and additional flagging. This is a living toolkit, so keep an eye out for updates. And feel free to drop a comment or question below. We’d love to hear your feedback!
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