ArcGIS Hosted Data Services: Understanding Service Usage

ℹ️ This series covers hosted services in ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Location Platform. See this overview for context.

If you’ve ever tried to make sense of your ArcGIS usage reports and found yourself wondering how your storage, bandwidth, or tile generation adds up, this article is for you.

Understanding how feature, vector tile, and map tile services are metered and monitored (and how developers and administrators can attribute their costs) remains a common challenge for many teams.

This article is written for product managers, DevOps, FinOps, and solution architects who need a clear picture of how metering and monitoring work behind the scenes, and how usage translates into operational or financial impact.

In this article, you’ll find:

• What gets metered
• Breakdown of usage metrics per service
• Service metering frequency
• Usage allocation
• Service monitoring tools
  • ArcGIS Portal “Status” tab
  • ArcGIS Location Platform Dashboard
• Where to find each metric
• When services stop working

By the end of the article, you’ll understand how the usage of hosted data services is measured and accounted for, how costs can be attributed to specific services, applications, or credentials, and where to find each metric. You’ll also learn how to monitor usage effectively, interpret reports, and use tools to detect anomalies or potential downtime.

Note: This article builds on ArcGIS Hosted Services: Terms of Use & Pricing and assumes you’re familiar with the material covered there.

What gets metered

Let’s take a closer look at what metrics matter and what they mean in the context of hosted data services:

• Tile generation: Number of map tiles or vector tiles created from a service.
• Storage: It is measured (and billed) in two ways:
  • File storage refers to static files, which include:
    • Pre-cached map tiles and vector tiles.
    • Attachments within feature services.
    • Static file used to create the services: tile packages, GeoJSON, CSV, etc.
  • Feature storage (applicable only to feature services) refers to the space required in the database to store structured data (points, lines, polygons, and associated attributes), which also includes indexes and drawing optimizations.
• Bandwidth: Volume of data transferred when map or vector tiles are requested, or when queries and edits are made to feature services.

Note: Although bandwidth usage is measured and displayed in ArcGIS Online monitoring tools, this does not incur any costs, as explained in the previous article.

Breakdown of usage metrics per service

To understand how your hosted services consume resources (and how each component impacts overall usage and billing), this section breaks down the key metrics tracked for each service type.

Each service measures different aspects of processing, storage, and data transfer.

Hosted tile services

Tile services (both map tiles and vector tiles) usage is primarily determined by how tiles are generated, stored, and delivered:

• Tile generation refers to the process of pre-caching tiles (when they are published from feature services), either
  • Statically: if all map tiles are pre-generated at publishing time.
  • On demand: for vector tiles, or when you configure the map tile service to be created on demand.
  • Manually: when you rebuild or update the cache later.
• File storage refers to the average amount of pre-cached static tiles stored as a result of the tile generation.
• Bandwidth measures the amount of data transferred when end users request tiles.

Hosted feature services

In terms of feature services, this is what’s been measured:

• Storage is incurred in both:
  • Feature storage: the average size of the feature data itself (geometry + attributes)..
  • File storage: any attachments (images, documents, etc.) stored alongside your features.
• Bandwidth: Measures the total amount of data transferred:
  • Reads: when clients load or query features.
  • Writes: when clients apply edits or updates.

Note: The hosted feature layer view consumes bandwidth but does not require additional storage.

Service metering frequency

Understanding how metering works helps you interpret usage dashboards and estimate approximate costs.

The metering frequency is the same for all types of hosted services types (feature, vector tile, or map tile) and for both ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Location Platform.

• Storage is metered hourly.
  The system records the amount of data stored every hour, including all services, attachments, and other hosted content (tile packages, static datasets, or any other supported item).
  This allows you to estimate the impact of temporary actions, such as uploading large datasets for short periods.
• Tile generation and bandwidth usage are tracked as they accur, with usage updates typically reflected within 5–10 minutes. Unlike storage, this timing has no effect on usage calculations.

Despite the frequency of system metering, each service has different recording and logging procedures, which may lead to delays in the monitoring tools for your review. See “Billing differences” to learn more about this.

Usage allocation

Before diving into service monitoring tools, it’s important to understand how usage measurements are allocated, as this directly impacts how you can attribute expenses to the service, application, user, or, when attribution is not possible, assumed by the organization.

The following table summarizes how the expenses can be attributed:

(1): ArcGIS Online are multi-user organizations while ArcGIS Location Platform are single-user organizations.

Service monitoring tools

Monitoring capabilities are the same across all hosted service types, but the available tools differ between products.

Both ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Location Platform users can check service usage through the “Status” tab in the Portal. In addition, ArcGIS Location Platform provides a dedicated Usage Dashboard with additional detailed reporting.

Let’s take a closer look at the differences between them.

ArcGIS Portal “Status” tab

You can monitor hosted data service usage from the Portal > Organization > “Status” tab. It provides several tools to explore and report on resource consumption:

• Reports:
  Generate one-time or scheduled reports with detailed usage information, such as:
  • Item report: provides a snapshot of all the content items, allowing you to explore the storage of all hosted data services.
  • Credit report: summarizes aggregated storage usage and tile generation per user.
  • Service usage: contains bandwidth usage associated with each data service or application.
• Dashboard:
  Allows you to filter and explore content and usage in different ways:
  • Both ArcGIS Online administrators and ArcGIS Location Platform users can filter and explore content usage, member activity and groups activity.
  • In addition, ArcGIS Online provides credit-consumption and apps-usage tabs.

Note: Although the Dashboard tab is available in both products, it is primarily designed to provide administrators in multi-user environments to dynamically explore organizational usage and activity.

ArcGIS Location Platform Dashboard

The ArcGIS Location Platform Dashboard enables you to monitor and analyze hosted service usage. Specifically, you can:

• View the last 24 hours’ usage trends, including aggregated bandwidth and tile generation.
• Check aggregated data hosting storage.
• Explore bandwidth usage per individual item.

Where to find each metric

So far, we’ve looked at:

• What is measured for each service type.
• How usage data is allocated and how costs can be attributed.
• Which tools you can use to monitor usage.

Now, let’s focus on where to find each metric in those tools.

The table below summarizes where each usage value is reported.

Note: Reported usage metrics may differ slightly from manual calculations or byte-level estimates. These variations are expected and do not impact billing accuracy.

When services stop working

If your hosted services become unavailable, the cause can be either a system outage or an account-related issue. Here’s how to check both.

Check system status

Start by confirming whether there’s an ongoing outage or maintenance event:

• ArcGIS Online Health Dashboard: status.arcgis.com
• ArcGIS Location Platform Status: status.location.arcgis.com

These dashboards show current service health, scheduled maintenance, and recent incidents that might affect availability.

Check your account status

If the dashboards report regular operation but your services are still down, review your account status. Access issues can result from billing limits or credit exhaustion.

• ArcGIS Location Platform:
  • If pay-as-you-go is disabled, your account loses access to services that exceed the free tier limits (check this example).
  • If a payment fails or the balance becomes negative, the account is suspended, and access tokens are denied until the issue is resolved.
• ArcGIS Online:
  • When credits run out, the organization enters a restricted state, and service operations may be limited.

Next steps

Now that you have a clear understanding of how service usage works, you are ready to explore how to monitor and optimize consumption, manage budgets effectively, and make informed, data-driven decisions when using these services.

We hope this series has helped you clarify the differences between these services and products, and that you now have a solid understanding to make more confident decisions when choosing which one to use.

If you have any questions, feel free to join the conversation in our community forums:

• Esri Community > ArcGIS Online Questions
• Esri Community > Developers > ArcGIS Location Platform Questions

Or if you found something confusing or believe you’ve spotted an error or inconsistency in this article, reach out to us at developers@esri.com.

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Thank you to everyone who contributed to the content of this article. You rock! Extra special thanks to Isaac Viel, John Foster, Todd Smith, and Kevin Gonzago.