ExxonMobil Leverages ArcGIS Monitor to Manage Global Enterprise GIS System and Maximize Performance

Technology is a key component of modern business and can help an organization run smoothly and enhance productivity. Managing IT infrastructure is a challenging undertaking that can pose many challenges, such as unplanned outages, security breaches, and software updates management. A skilled, knowledgeable IT team can help an organization streamline operations and keep a business moving. 

ExxonMobil is a global organization that is one of the largest integrated fuels, lubricants, and chemical companies. The Enterprise Geospatial Solutions (EGS)  team at ExxonMobil is the IT group that manages the ArcGIS infrastructure for the worldwide organization. The team also focuses on enhancing system performance and resolving technical issues for its thousands of employees, who range from scientists to engineers and researchers. 

With operations in more than 60 countries, the EGS team is responsible for managing a large global enterprise system. Years of steady growth in their organizational usage of the ArcGIS Enterprise system led to increased downtime and latency problems. The team wanted a solution to help them monitor performance and stay ahead of any technical issues. In 2023, they partnered with Esri to configure ArcGIS Monitor, which offers tools to monitor the health of their enterprise geographic information system (GIS). 

Using  ArcGIS Monitor has helped the EGS team more proactively address technical problems and has provided them with more insights into their system, helping them deliver the critical services ExxonMobil staff rely on.

As current users of Esri technology, the comprehensive system of ExxonMobil includes ArcGIS Enterprise (Portal for ArcGIS  and more than 40 ArcGIS Server sites); multiple ArcGIS Online subscriptions to support field operations; and Esri’s premier desktop application, ArcGIS Pro. 

The main ArcGIS Enterprise portal is in ExxonMobil’s headquarters in Houston, Texas, which is what staff members primarily utilize, along with two smaller enterprise portals in Qatar and Papua New Guinea. According to Nicholas Chase, GIS  system architect for the EGS team at ExxonMobil, there have been between 5,000 and 8,000 staff actively using a portal in the past year. 

Over the last 10 years, the EGS team has expanded their use of Web GIS. Chase explains that the EGS team didn’t have the tools to track their growing system and monitor its performance. 

“As [the system] grew and more people were using it across the entire organization, it became really [disconcerting] as the central support team to find out about a server outage from our users,” says Chase. 

The ExxonMobil staff were largely using ArcMap. However, as more users began to transition to a Web GIS, Chase notes there was significant growth from that and an uptake in using more simplified web apps and solutions. The system then started experiencing some technical issues, including the following examples. 

In 2018, Chase explains that around 500 services were running on ArcGIS Server. The GIS server was continually crashing, and the EGS team wasn’t aware of the technical issues until users brought it to their attention. A similar instance occurred in 2023 when a GIS server was overwhelmed with a large number of services. The EGS team had to manually shut things down and reset the maximum number of services to prevent any further issues. 

In the fall of 2020, the main GIS server in Houston, Texas, became unstable, and services were crashing without notice for more than a month. EGS personnel spent time after-hours reducing the minimum/maximum instances for 350 or more services. 

In 2023, technical issues continued with severe latency (a long delay in the time it takes for data to transfer across a network) reported by Qatar portal users, as well as a hosting server in Houston becoming overloaded. The latter can result in performance issues or server failure. 

The group wanted a solution that would help them improve performance and get the data they needed to troubleshoot faster. The EGS team also wanted metrics displayed visually and the ability to collect and retain performance data for an extended period of time. 

After these ongoing technical issues, Chase says that’s when they decided to get serious about using ArcGIS Monitor. ArcGIS Monitor is an enterprise-grade monitoring solution that provides information about system health, usage, and performance. The EGS team originally deployed ArcGIS Monitor in 2020, using version 10.8.1, but according to Chase and Paul Sanders, product owner for the EGS team at ExxonMobil, the EGS team did not have the time or resources to properly optimize the deployment. 

“We’ve been using some version of Monitor in limited capacity going back 10 years maybe. [In 2018 or 2019] we tried to install Monitor and throw resources at it, and that’s when we discovered [we may need assistance],” explains Chase. He says he then spoke with Esri for help setting up the latest version of this solution. 

Sanders notes traditional monitoring tools for server environments allow you to monitor some things like storage capacity and focus primarily on infrastructure, but Monitor works specifically with ArcGIS technology. 

“The real benefit of Monitor is the integration of the different components of the ArcGIS infrastructure…specifically the services and being able to look at your services, what’s running, and see down to the individual service level,” says Sanders. “That’s a huge positive.”

The EGS team connected with Andrew Sakowicz, an associate director with Esri Professional Services, who helped configure version 2023.3.1 of Monitor during an on-site three-day workshop in 2023. They also received valuable post-engagement support to help them make any necessary tweaks. 

“If I were to try to do these visualizations myself individually… it would take forever. But with the Esri support, we were able to just kind of drop these into the back-end PostgreSQL database and just have them available for us to copy right to our different servers and our different set of services,” says Sanders. “So that was a huge benefit there, was having the knowledge and know-how.”

According to Chase, Sakowicz helped the EGS team organize within Monitor using features such as labels, notifications, and collections. Sanders explains that each city with a deployment is grouped into collections for monitoring, with Houston being the largest. Collections are groups of components that serve as the foundation for their analysis views in ArcGIS Monitor. 

The EGS team says Sakowicz helped them customize their analysis views that offer detailed metrics and help identify trends in data. The team also uses alerts in Monitor to ensure the system is running smoothly and to receive email notifications on possible performance issues.

Chase, who describes Monitor as a user-friendly tool, says Sakowicz helped them maximize their deployment. “Having Andrew [Sakowicz] come on-site and helping us build those collections and the analysis dashboards [was invaluable],” he says. 

The EGS team is now using Monitor to survey their entire enterprise GIS system, and it has helped them identify the most used resources. Sanders says having the detailed data at their fingertips is very valuable to them as a support team. The EGS team monitors storage capacity, server connectivity, request response time, and CPU utilization. The metrics have made it easier for the team to gain insight into their system to more effectively manage their GIS servers. 

“When you think about traditional IT responses, it’s reactive. And this [Monitor] allows us to be a little bit more proactive,” says Sanders. “We’ve gotten to the point now where the support team, if they get a ticket in…the first thing they’re checking is Monitor. It just helps us be a more effective support team for ArcGIS.”

Sanders says ArcGIS Monitor helps them pinpoint the underlying symptoms of a problem, and the visualization of key metrics helps the team troubleshoot faster. The visualization gives quick system details like availability, and Sanders says the additional information helps them ensure that the business is operating efficiently.

Sanders and Chase also appreciate the alerts, which they configured to create visibility on potential issues. The pair explain that they can now identify what the support team deems critical and change the alerts to reflect that. 

“The alerts are a hugely positive piece of it because not everybody on the team is going to log in to Monitor…on a daily basis, but they can get an email on a daily basis and see what’s going on in the system,” explains Sanders. 

The metrics provided by Monitor also give the EGS team the data needed to justify requests or prove the need for their resources . For example, when the server operations team recently wanted to take back cores and reduce memory due to low utilization, the EGS team was able to show that average utilization was between 60 and 80 percent during business hours. 

The Infosys part of the EGS team at ExxonMobil says Monitor is a valuable tool that helps them administer their environment better and often leads to faster response time. Chase says the group can now more quickly address issues from staff because often when something is reported, they’ve already seen the alerts and are working on a solution. 

The successful deployment of Monitor has led the EGS team to make it a key component as they migrate their on-premises infrastructure to the cloud and redesign their overall system. Chase explains that understanding how users are using that infrastructure and its capacity capabilities will be essential as they design the system. 

“When you’re building a new infrastructure and you…don’t know how the cloud infrastructure is going to work with your deployment today, Monitor is going to be really important to that because we’ll have insight into it and data behind it. We’ll be able to make more proactive decisions,” says Chase.