Dallas Police Department Ensures Data Availability with ArcGIS Monitor

More than 1.3 million people in the nation’s ninth-largest city depend on the Dallas Police Department (DPD) for safety and security. It is the eighth largest police force in the United States and the second largest in Texas. In turn, the DPD relies on its geographic information system (GIS) servers—part of its enterprise GIS deployment—to keep GIS data and location-based services readily available. But it hasn’t always been easy.

The Dallas Police Department’s GIS team struggled to maintain the reliability and performance of its enterprise GIS infrastructure, as frequent server downtime and performance issues threatened its critical law enforcement operations. As a result, the team was unable to focus on strategic tasks, and the department’s overall operations were impacted by the unavailability of critical GIS applications and data.

In 2012, the Dallas Police Department (DPD) GIS division was a small team of four, tasked with managing a single ArcGIS Server host that was intended to handle all their GIS needs. This server enabled critical applications vital to police department operations essential for law enforcement activities, such as crime mapping, incident response, and strategic planning. The setup was initially manageable but became a bottleneck as department usage and reliance on GIS solutions and data grew.

A primary challenge was frequent GIS server downtime. This disrupted the team’s workflow and impacted the availability of essential GIS applications and data. As Sergeant D.J. Beaty, GIS supervisor at the DPD explained, “There was only one server, and everything was on it. If something happened, you knew which server it was, but finding and then fixing the exact problem was a lot to manage.”

Another significant issue was enabling performant web services. When web services were under heavy load, it often caused disruptions. This not only consumed valuable time but also led to delays in mission-critical tasks, such as updating maps and analyzing crime data.

The team also encountered performance problems, with the GIS server struggling to handle the increasing load of GIS operations, leading to slow response times and frustrated users. Disk space management was an additional issue since they couldn’t immediately determine when disks were nearing full capacity.

A significant disconnect between the GIS team and the city’s Information & Technology Services (ITS) department—responsible for servers across the citywide network—compounded these technical challenges. This made it difficult for the team to get the support they needed to manage their technical challenges effectively.

The issues became more urgent as the department added more GIS servers over time and their enterprise GIS grew. Without a way to proactively monitor GIS server performance, conducting system checks was both time-consuming and inefficient, often allowing critical issues to go unnoticed. For example, a GIS server was once turned off for an entire month without anyone realizing it, leading to a significant disruption in services.

“There came a point where all I did was watch servers and services. I was logging in remotely to these servers on a daily basis, and sometimes I’d be logged into five or six of them at once,” Beaty said.

Recognizing the system’s growing complexity and demands, Beaty advocated for adding a monitoring tool. Esri’s ArcGIS Monitor collects metrics on system health, performance, and usage to optimize an enterprise GIS implementations—a perfect fit with their existing ArcGIS Enterprise deployment.

A key feature of ArcGIS Monitor is its ability to identify and address potential problems before they become critical. For instance, the tool can detect when disk space is running low and send an alert, preventing issues caused by full disks. It also provides near real-time monitoring of server performance, helping the team quickly identify and resolve any issues.

Beaty’s team installed ArcGIS Monitor in November 2024. After the initial software download and licensing, they worked with the city’s ITS department and Esri professional services to configure the tool, configure the necessary databases, and connect it with the department’s servers.

ITS provided a mail host address for email notifications and helped adjust alert thresholds to better align with overall system processes. For example, certain scheduled processes—such as weekend backup jobs—were triggering critical alerts due to temporary CPU spikes and disk utilization. These thresholds were adjusted to reduce unnecessary alerts and better reflect meaningful performance events.

Now, with ArcGIS Monitor, Beaty and his team receive alerts and notifications about the health and status of their GIS servers and services, allowing them to proactively address issues such as server downtime, service locks, and high CPU usage. ArcGIS Monitor also offers a centralized view for logs, metrics, and GIS server status, enabling the team to monitor and manage their environment more efficiently.

The team has created an analysis view to display logs, metrics, and GIS server availability on a large monitor for everyone to see. This centralized view, along with automatic system notifications, has allowed the team to be more proactive in addressing issues. They can quickly identify and resolve problems, ensuring their services remain available and reliable.

By providing detailed insights into the department’s operations and the specific challenges faced by Beaty and his team, ArcGIS Monitor has helped demonstrate the need for the allocated system resources to support DPD’s enterprise GIS.

ArcGIS Monitor has also given back time to the GIS team, Beaty in particular. He can now focus on other important tasks and responsibilities. “I have other tasks and things I do like hiring staff and performance evaluations. I can now focus on those without constantly monitoring the servers.”

The improvements in server health and service reliability have had a positive impact on the DPD’s overall operations. Critical GIS applications and data are now more accessible and reliable. The team’s ability to proactively address issues has reduced the risk of major disruptions, ensuring that the DPD can focus on mission-critical business operations and continue to provide high-quality services to the community.