How Maryland Modernized its Enterprise GIS with ArcGIS Monitor

Under the Office of Enterprise Data, the Maryland Department of Information Technology (DoIT) supports a large mission-critical enterprise geographic information system (GIS) environment that 45 state agencies, local governments, and the public have come to rely on.

Each day, thousands of people go to the state’s iMAP Portal, called MD iMAP to access authoritative web maps that support current and historical imagery services, community planning, housing, emergency response, and transportation. MD iMAP is Maryland DoIT’s centralized GIS platform that provides access to share geospatial data.

By 2022, growing demand pushed Maryland DoIT’s existing GIS infrastructure beyond its design limits, and the system began to experience strain.

“We were using it to the point where it was starting to cause problems in production with the public—where it would timeout and we would get messages saying, ‘Hey, we can’t get to the service’,” said Dawn Blanchard, director of data management. “The service was still up, but it wasn’t available for users.”

It was then that Maryland DoIT faced a critical moment: modernize its enterprise GIS while continuing to provide uninterrupted public access. Blanchard and Susan Hmel, a GIS developer, whose work bridges GIS and enterprise IT, were tasked with solving this challenge.

At a time of increasing demand, Maryland DoIT was preparing for a major migration to a new hybrid system architecture. This would combine a private infrastructure with Amazon Web Services, which, while necessary, did not come without risk.

The enterprise GIS had not been upgraded since 2018, with outages and performance degradation becoming increasingly common. In the old system, there were some custom Python scripts that pushed GIS data into different environments, which made issues harder to track down and fix. The disruptions were forcing staff to spend significant time reviewing system logs without being able to quickly pinpoint root causes. 

Blanchard and the GIS team needed a new enterprise GIS they could customize, scale, and rely on under peak demand, and remain reliable for public users—all while avoiding overburdening staff. 

To help with the much-needed system upgrade, while enhancing long-term information technology goals, Maryland DoIT implemented ArcGIS Monitor in March 2025.

An extension for ArcGIS Enterprise, ArcGIS Monitor provides centralized, near real-time visibility into system health, service usage, and infrastructure performance. Monitor enables observability for ArcGIS. “We find Monitor very beneficial,” said Hmel. “It’s helped us understand any problems that might be happening within our system before they become a problem that our customers or anyone in the public is aware of.” 

Now Maryland’s DoIT staff can continuously observe ArcGIS Server sites, get metrics and insights into memory, CPU, performance, and usage trends. “Right now I’m seeing 19 ArcGIS Server sites, 46 different machine hosts, and a couple thousand services like web applications maps that we’re monitoring,” added Hmel. “Monitor establishes a baseline for what our maximum level of support can be. It helps us look good to upper management as well.”

Before the enterprise GIS upgrade, Maryland DoIT staff often learned that something wasn’t working only after it had already failed—sometimes from customers like the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, one of their largest users. That challenge became more pronounced during the transition from iMAP 3.0 to 4.0, which significantly increased the number of hosts and servers in use, creating a more complex enterprise GIS environment.  The upgrade from legacy 3.0 software allowed for MD iMAP to support larger imagery datasets, including lidar, and created the hybrid cloud architecture.

“It became three times as big as what we previously had, so Monitor was a great way to keep track of it all,” said Hmel, explaining how the tool has become a foundational component of its modernized enterprise GIS.

Additionally, staff had to understand and keep track of how many users were in the system, how much it was being used, and how to maintain it smoothly. Now, for instance, the Department of Natural Resources can keep track of their own metrics and recognize low-use services that can be deprioritized or scaled down. “I get customers who say, ‘I can make better decisions now that I know which services are used the most or which apps aren’t,’” said Hmel.

With ArcGIS Monitor, these insights enable management to make better-informed decisions about resource allocation which directly correlate to cost savings. And because of the integration, ArcGIS Monitor insights have strengthened communication between the GIS and IT departments. 

“We’re creating dashboards and different reports to share in our weekly meetings about what’s going on with the servers, any critical errors, and GIS infrastructure in general,” continued Hmel. “We have optimized our services too, and we now have a better picture of which services are the most popular and which ones need more resources available to them.”

By integrating ArcGIS Monitor into its enterprise GIS, Maryland DoIT has achieved the visibility and confidence it needed to support a growing, mission-critical platform without disrupting public access.