ArcGIS Blog

ArcGIS Online Credit Budgeting and Allocation Tools

Recently, I gave an overview of ArcGIS Online credits and wrote briefly about some best practices and tools that can help administrators manage credit consumption in their organizational accounts. In this post, I am going to devote a little bit more space to ArcGIS Online’s newest administrative feature, credit budgeting and allocation.

I work a lot with colleges and universities around the world. The administrator of an ArcGIS Online organization in a university faces some unique challenges. They are responsible for managing hundreds to thousands of users and those users are constantly changing roles or leaving the institution semester after semester. For them, the ability to assign credit budgets was hands down the most requested enhancement to ArcGIS Online. The reason being that in restricting the number of credits an individual or group of users can consume, you are able to extend access to more ArcGIS Online functionality without risk of users singlehandedly spending all of your organization’s credits.

The ability to allocate credit budgets to users is a major breakthrough for any ArcGIS Online administrator, regardless of the type of organization. Here’s how it works:

FAQs

How can users spend their credit budgets?

Credits allocated to users are spent using tile generation, geoenrichment, geocoding, and analysis services ONLY. Credits spent in publishing features or storing items are not subtracted from individual credit limits, but are subtracted from your organization’s total. Use the View Status dashboard to keep an eye out for particularly large and costly items and their owners.

What happens when a user exceeds their credit budget?

An e-mail will be sent to both the user and the administrator notifying them that there are no more credits available for the user who has exceeded their budget. Users will still have access to their content, but they will not have access to tile generation, geoenrichment, geocoding, or analysis services until the administrator allocates more credits.

How can I assign more credits to a user after they have spent their allotment?

Allocate more credits to the user using the workflow in the video above. Instead of searching for the user by group, you can search by name and assign more credits to a specific user who has exceeded his/her limit.

How many credits can I allocate my users?

When managing your credit budget, you can choose to give them access to the organization’s total allotment of remaining credits, or you can set a limit for each user of any value up to that figure. Allocations may be modified at any time.

NOTE:

The total of individual credit budgets may exceed your organization’s total number of available credits. For example, if I have an organization with 5 users and 1000 credits, I can set individual budgets of 250 credits for each of my 5 users (1250 credits total). This is possible because individual and organizational credit limits are managed independently. The budgets prevent any one user from spending more than 250 credits. If there are still credits available in the organization, and the user has not met their credit budget, they are able to spend more credits if their role permits them.

As mentioned in my previous blog post, there are several ways control your organization’s credit consumption, credit budgeting is just one of them. Keep an eye out for future blog posts that will dig deeper into some of these methods.

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