Inside Woolpert’s Observability Strategy with ArcGIS Monitor Running 24/7

Woolpert, an Esri partner, is an architecture, engineering, and geospatial (AEG) company that works with clients in many industries such as aviation, education, government at all levels, maritime, and utilities. Based in Dayton, Ohio, Woolpert has over 3,000 employees and more than 75 offices across five continents. They use geographic information system (GIS) technology, specifically Esri’s ArcGIS software, for a wide range of activities, including infrastructure and asset management, building information modeling (BIM) for sustainable design, and other innovative applications across their projects.

Their work also includes operating a fleet of aircraft, sensors, and uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) to collect aerial imagery. They refer to themselves as an AEG—architecture, engineering, and geospatial—company, because they leverage GIS in many of their projects. GIS helps them remove data and decision-making silos to provide a common operating picture for clients.

Woolpert has worked on many infrastructure projects that involve field data collection. Until about eight years ago, many of these projects were using older technology for field data collection. “We were looking for a way to collect a lot of data,” said Darren Johnson, database specialist for Woolpert. “The cumbersome database and in-house developed proprietary field collection solution wasn’t meeting their needs at the time.” 

This led to inefficiencies, with many individual file geodatabase datasets having to be aggregated, then undergoing a quality control process. This made the process challenging. “Once we got our foot in the door with ArcGIS Enterprise, there was a light bulb moment where different departments within the organization saw the potential and started taking advantage of it,” said Johnson. Using ArcGIS Enterprise enabled them to use an enterprise geodatabase, publish feature services, and support concurrent editors in the field more efficiently. 

For Woolpert, ArcGIS Enterprise isn’t just a product they use to provide geospatial infrastructure for client projects; they also actively use it to support internal daily GIS operations. Across its departments, the firm has 400 active GIS users and 300 viewers. 

As more business units realized the advantages of ArcGIS Enterprise to support client projects, its usage grew and the volume of data and maps on Woolpert’s GIS servers increased. Many different business units would publish their own data onto the GIS servers, and the GIS team was responsible for managing the infrastructure supporting the enterprise GIS. “The GIS servers were getting very bogged down, and we were trying to figure out where exactly the performance issues were coming from,” explained Johnson.

To avoid delays for their client project work, Woolpert administrators would spend hours troubleshooting slow data processing issues, system time-outs, and lost connectivity for those end users out of cellular service range.

But it wasn’t enough.

They even deployed sector-specific GIS servers to try to optimize system resources and help tune their databases. But end users would call days later with the same concerns about performance issues when collecting data from the field.

Then, in 2018, Esri launched ArcGIS Monitor. It provides observability by checking how well ArcGIS Enterprise is working; it looks at system health, performance, and usage. ArcGIS Monitor can send alerts via notifications to administrators about potential system issues. “Everything all in one place, it sounded too good to be true. ArcGIS Monitor gave us the insights that we didn’t have before,” said Cheryl Spencer, technical solutions consultant at Woolpert. “It can help pinpoint where problems are for us to see faster and get people back in the field.”

With its primary GIS server analysis view, Woolpert can monitor 170 GIS services at one time within a single display. “ArcGIS Monitor was an out-of-the-box [solution] that would monitor all of our log files, which services were the most used, and for how long—there were just a lot of benefits that we saw, [like] response time and alerts,” added Johnson. “This allows us to see what is happening now, what connectivity is available and any requests.” ArcGIS Monitor also enables the GIS team to not have to rely on the IT department to give information like the GIS servers’ RAM and CPU usage, because Monitor provides this information.

Previously, field crews often faced mobile app time-outs when trying to send data back to the main office. If they lost internet access or cell phone reception, their maps would vanish, and the system appeared unresponsive, with 30-second render times largely due to delays caused by high usage. “To the end user, it just wasn’t working,” said Spencer. To address this, Woolpert staff shared an example of where a new ArcGIS Server was deployed and dedicated to field crews, allowing Woolpert to monitor operations in a more controlled environment. “We pinpointed when issues occurred and showed crews how to fine-tune map services for better field performance—it was night-and-day for them,” said Johnson.

For their enterprise portal, Woolpert enterprise GIS admins can observe an average of 10 to 15 field crews’ activities in near real time as they work on different water and energy projects across the US. They have configured an analysis view in Monitor that tracks average response times, total requests, and any time-outs of services from ArcGIS Enterprise, like ArcGIS Field Maps used by field crews.

ArcGIS Monitor also helps Woolpert to go above and beyond what traditional IT departments have access to. “It’s a compliment to what IT is already monitoring. This gives us the metrics to validate that we’re making the right decisions,” said Spencer.

In their daily operations, the enterprise GIS team at Woolpert can be more proactive when there are data collection performance and storage level issues with their client projects. They can also see which services may be underutilized and what information from the GIS servers can be deleted to conserve and optimize system resources. “Now if we do get a call, we can find things much faster to isolate and troubleshoot,” said Spencer.

Annie Short, an information solutions program manager at Woolpert who leads a team of GIS analysts and developers, emphasized why ArcGIS Monitor is such an effective solution for them. “As consultants, we want to keep clients happy, which includes delivering products on time, so if anything is down and people can’t work, that’s bad from a project manager’s perspective,” Short explained. “Because system downtime impacts the schedule and people cannot be productive if they are waiting on system performance issues. So, it’s a huge event if anything is down; it’s a like fire engine alert situation.”

Woolpert has over 600 clients (domestic and global); therefore, the firm needs to track situations across time zones nearly 24/7. “The overall goal is to have everyone productive and creating, and if we get from Monitor that there is a large problem (with the enterprise GIS) . . . that can be communicated and solving the problem becomes immediately prioritized,” continued Short. “In that case, we are using ArcGIS Monitor to improve performance metrics.”

Operational awareness, system reliability, and efficiency of the enterprise GIS are critical to supporting Woolpert’s geospatial initiatives across global teams. Through its use of ArcGIS Monitor, the organization has addressed performance challenges, minimized system downtime, and helped to maintain billable hours and project schedules. These practical outcomes reflect how enabling observability for their enterprise GIS has made all the difference for Woolpert and the clients they serve.