FAQ

This guide is for new and experienced ArcGIS Location Platform, ArcGIS Online, and ArcGIS Enterprise developers who want to learn how to securely store, manage, and access their data in ArcGIS.

The table below shows the account types you can use and limitations:

The following table provides an overview of the functionality available with each type of authentication:

The cost of storing content and accessing data services depends on the type of account you have:

• ArcGIS Location Platform: Uses a pay-as-you-go billing model with a monthly free tier for data storage and usage (bandwidth). To learn more, go to ArcGIS Location Platform > Pricing.

• ArcGIS Online: Uses a credit consumption model to store content and access services. To learn more, go to ArcGIS Online > Credits by capability.

Esri's Terms of Use documents include legal guidelines for the use of Esri products, services, and data.

Some of the key documents you will find are the:

1. Master Agreements
2. Product-specific Terms of Use
3. ArcGIS Location Platform Agreements
4. Data attributions and Terms of Use
5. Copyrights and Trademarks

A portal is a website with applications and tools that can be used to create, manage, access, and share geospatial content and data. It supports security and authentication, content and data service management, user and group management, and site administration. A portal is created when a new user signs up for ArcGIS Location Platform or ArcGIS Online or when Portal for ArcGIS is installed for ArcGIS Enterprise. Every portal has an organization. Members of the organization can access a portal by signing in with an ArcGIS account. A portal contains applications and tools to manage developer credentials, content, data services, users and groups, the organization, and the overall site.

There are two types of portals:

• ArcGIS Location Platform and ArcGIS Online: The portal is created dynamically when a new user signs up for ArcGIS Location Platform or ArcGIS Online (subscription). It is hosted in Esri's infrastructure and accessed by signing into ArcGIS.com.

• ArcGIS Enterprise: The portal is created by installing ArcGIS Enterprise and Portal for ArcGIS. It is hosted in your own infrastructure and accessed by signing in to the domain you assign.

The portal service provides the functionality to securely create, access, and manage content, data services, users, and groups in a portal. Every portal has a unique instance of the portal service. It can be hosted in Esri's infrastructure or ArcGIS Enterprise. The portal service functions as a directory service that organizes and provides access to items, data services, files, users, and groups. It provides secure access to all resources and supports API key authentication, user authentication, and app authentication.

There are two types of portal services:

• ArcGIS Location Platform and ArcGIS Online services: A portal service created and hosted in Esri's infrastructure when a new user signs up for ArcGIS Location Platform or ArcGIS Online. The service is available to developers who have an ArcGIS Location Platform account or ArcGIS Online account associated with the organization.

• ArcGIS Enterprise portal services: A portal service you can host in your own infrastructure with ArcGIS Enterprise and Portal for ArcGIS. The service is available to developers who have an ArcGIS Enterprise account associated with the organization.

A portal is a website with applications and tools that can be used to create, manage, access, and share geospatial content and services in an organization. While the portal service is the content management service that supports a portal. Every portal hosted by Esri or installed on-premise in your own infrastructure has a portal service. You use the portal service to access and manage geospatial content in a portal.

To access your portal, you need an access token. In general, there three types of authentication that can be used to get an access token and access services:

1. API key authentication (ArcGIS Location Platform only)
2. User authentication
3. App authentication

Different authentication types result in access tokens with different privileges and account associations. The type of authentication you use will depend on the security and access requirements of your app.

To add users to your portal, follow these high-level instructions:

1. Sign into your portal as an administrator.
2. Click the Organization tab at the top, then click Members tab.
3. Click Invite members to add new users.
4. You have two options to add members:
5. Review the member details and send invitations or add members directly.

New members will receive an email invitation to join the organization. You can also add multiple users at once by uploading a CSV file with their details instead of adding them one by one.

The following file formats can be added to your portal:

• CSV (Comma Separated Value text files)
• Zipped shapefile (must include a .prj projection file)
• GPS Exchange Format (.gpx) file
• KML or KMZ (Keyhole Markup Language)
• Imagery files (.gif, .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .tif, .tiff)
• 3D tiles package (.3tz)
• 360 VR Experience (.3vr)
• Apache Parquet (.parquet)
• CAD drawing (.zip)
• Deep learning package (.zip or .dlpk)
• Desktop application (.zip)
• Desktop application template (.zip)

Additionally, users can add content to a portal by:

• Uploading files up to 500 GB through the web browser
• Accessing online content from within ArcGIS Desktop
• Dragging and dropping a CSV file directly into a Map window

To share your data with others in your ArcGIS organization, you can follow these steps:

• Add your data as items to your portal. This could be maps, layers, scenes, apps, or other content you want to share.

• Refine the item details by including a summary, description, tags, and a custom thumbnail to make your content stand out.

• Identify your target audience within your organization. You can share your items with your entire organization, specific groups you belong to, or a combination of the two.

For example, you can share data with all members of your organization, as well as a more specialized group.

• To share with your organization, you can select the items, click Share, and choose to share with your organization.

• To share with a specific group, you can create a group and invite the relevant members, then share the items with that group.

• You can also share items with both your organization and a specific group if you want to make the content available to all members but also highlight it for a particular audience.

The level of security is controlled by the sharing level you set for the data service. To set the sharing level, you use a hosted layer (item).

The sharing levels available for different products are listed below:

You can set whether a user can see an item in your portal by setting the sharing level. Sharing is the process of making your content accessible to users in your portal.

The following is a list of the sharing levels available for the different types of ArcGIS products:

Yes, in portal, you can search and access publicly shared content outside of your own organization. Publicly shared content refers to data, maps, web apps, and other resources that are made accessible to everyone and not just within a specific organization.

You can use groups in portal to organize and share your content. You use groups to:

• Categorize content by topic or project.
• Control access and collaboration.
• Improve sharing and discovery of items.

Here are some ways to use groups to organize your content:

• Create a private group in your organization to collaborate internally with your team during the development process.
• Create a public group to share your finished products to the public.
• Use group categories or tags to categorize related groups by topic or project.

Yes. Your portal settings can be configured in the organization settings, allowing administrators to control who can access specific content, apps, and services within the portal.

Data services are services created dynamically to securely store, manage, and provide access to your data in portal. Some of the types of services that can be created are:

• Feature services
• Vector tile services
• Map tile services
• Image services

Data services are typically created by importing data with the data management tools. A unique URL for the service is assigned by the system when it is created. Data services can also be created programmatically with scripting libraries such as the ArcGIS API for Python and ArcGIS REST JS. Data services are managed with hosted layers (items) in a portal. Data services can be accessed through ArcGIS Maps SDKs and open source libraries using a URL and ID, or the item ID in the portal.

Yes, Esri offers data hosting through ArcGIS Location Platform, ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise (Portal for ArcGIS) that allow you to securely store, manage, and access your geographic data as hosted data services.

Several key points:

• ArcGIS Online allows you to publish your data as hosted layers, which are hosted and managed by Esri's cloud infrastructure. This includes hosted feature layers, vector tile layers, and map tile layers.

• With ArcGIS Enterprise, you can host data services in your own portal's infrastructure and managed database. This gives you more control but requires maintaining your own servers.

• Hosted feature layers support vector data visualization, querying, and editing. You can create hosted feature layer views with different settings like editing capabilities or sharing permissions.

• Both ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Enterprise allow you to control user permissions and roles for accessing and editing the hosted data.

The type of data service you use depends on the product you have, the format of your existing data, storage and output data format requirements, the size and complexity of the data, and the service functionality required.

Below is an overview of the main services and the data type each supports.

You can use many different ArcGIS Maps SDKs, open source libraries, and scripting APIs to access data services. You can also access the services directly with ArcGIS REST APIs.

The ArcGIS Maps SDKs also work with feature services efficiently to cache data. They will satisfy query requests using client-side caches when the data is available rather than making additional requests to the service. To achieve scalable performance the ArcGIS Maps SDKs automatically make use of dynamic feature tile queries when displaying feature layers from feature services. This enables automatic change-aware response caching of these shareable tile responses at origin servers as well as in the global CDN. This is essential to achieving scalable performance for viral mapping applications that may experience heavy load from tens or hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. The alternative is the publishing of vector tile services or map tile services together with alternative mechanisms to keep them up to date as data changes.

A hosted feature layer, also referred to as a hosted feature layer (item), is an item in a portal that you use to manage the properties and settings of a feature layer and feature service. A feature layer is a server-side dataset that can be accessed through a feature service. A feature layer contains features with the geometry type and set of attributes.

No, your data is your data. You retain complete ownership of your content.

The best practices you should follow largely depend on the data services you are using, the size and complexity of the data, the functionality required, and how many users will access your application, but in general consider the following:

• Use ArcGIS Maps SDKs to display and query features
• Configure the CDN cache
• Enable drawing optimization
• Configure field and spatial indexes
• Only enable editing on layers that require updates
• Use feature layer views instead of uploading your data more than once
• Search for strings with full-text indexes instead of using the "LIKE" operator
• Consider rebuilding spatial indexes
• Use repeatable queries instead of unique queries
• Use client-side queries instead of server-side queries
• Consider publishing vector tile services or map tile services to display datasets with many features
• Only include the required attributes when publishing vector tile services
• Only build map tile caches for the visible range (zoom levels) required
• Consider manually generating map tile caches for areas that will be frequently visited
• Consider upgrading your feature data store

When using ArcGIS Location Platform and ArcGIS Online, your feature service data are stored in cloud-based servers that are designed to be robust and optimized for geospatial applications. However, in order to meet the higher performance and scalability requirements of some applications, the following feature data store options are available:

1. Basic Feature Data Store: ArcGIS Location Platform includes a basic feature service data store. The basic database is designed to perform well for applications designed to host up to 100 GB of feature storage while servicing up to a few thousand users.

2. Standard Feature Data Store: ArcGIS Online includes the standard data store which improves both performance and storage capacity over the Basic feature data store. Standard is designed to handle large volumes of data and support a high number of concurrent users. The standard database is designed to perform well for applications designed to host up to 500 GB of feature storage while servicing up to several thousand users. The underlying infrastructure is engineered to scale resources as needed, ensuring optimal performance even during peak usage periods. ArcGIS Online organizations are created with a Standard feature data store.

3. Premium Feature Data Store: This option is available if you have ArcGIS Online. The premium database offers fixed feature data store pricing and greater support for intensive and high-volume data workflows. The entry point for Premium Feature Data Store is M1, which provides double the database processing power of Standard Feature Data Store. Each additional Premium Feature Data Store level provides twice the processing power of the previous, up to M4.

If you have ArcGIS Online, your data can be migrated between Standard Feature Data Store and Premium Feature Data Store. However, data can not be migrated either from or to Basic Feature Data Store.

Data store summary

Regional data hosting refers to the region where your hosted geospatial data is stored. It allows you to store your content and data in different regions such as United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Regional data hosting can reduce network latency and improve the overall performance of accessing data services from your region of the world. It can also help support data localization and regulatory requirements for different regions.

Regional data hosting includes the following types of content and data:

• Features (feature services)
• Vector tiles (vector tile services) and map tiles (map tile services)
• Data files (feature attachments and document items)
• Web maps

All other content and user information — for example, subscriber and subscription information, item metadata, groups and sharing information, and usage accounting — is stored and managed in the United States. In addition, other location services such as geocoding, routing, places, and GeoEnrichment run in the United States.

Regional data hosting is available for Standard Feature Data Store and Premium Feature Data Store. The location is selected when the service is purchased and cannot be changed after purchase. Regions include the United States, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

To enable regional data hosting, please contact us.

Data data storage refers to all of the content items stored in your portal and the data that supports your data services.

The two types of data storage you are charged for are:

1. Feature storage: The total storage size of the features stored in feature service databases.
2. Tiles, files and attachments storage: The total storage size of map tiles (map tile services) and vector tiles (vector tile services), items that represent files such as shapefiles, GeoJSON, and CSVs, and feature attachments such as images or PDFs. This also includes the size of the item metadata.

When using ArcGIS Platform and ArcGIS Online, your feature service data are stored in cloud-based servers that are designed to be robust and optimized for geospatial applications. However, in order to meet the higher performance and scalability requirements of some applications, the following feature data store options are available:

1. Basic Feature Data Store: ArcGIS Platform includes a basic feature service data store. The basic database is designed to perform well for applications designed to host up to 100 GB of feature storage while servicing up to a few thousand users.

2. Standard Feature Data Store: ArcGIS Online includes the standard data store which improves both performance and storage capacity over the Basic feature data store. Standard is designed to handle large volumes of data and support a high number of concurrent users. The standard database is designed to perform well for applications designed to host up to 500 GB of feature storage while servicing up to several thousand users. The underlying infrastructure is engineered to scale resources as needed, ensuring optimal performance even during peak usage periods. ArcGIS Online organizations are created with a Standard feature data store.

3. Premium Feature Data Store: This option is available if you have ArcGIS Online. The premium database offers fixed feature data store pricing and greater support for intensive and high-volume data workflows. The entry point for Premium Feature Data Store is M1, which provides double the database processing power of Standard Feature Data Store. Each additional Premium Feature Data Store level provides twice the processing power of the previous, up to M4.

If you have ArcGIS Online, your data can be migrated between Standard Feature Data Store and Premium Feature Data Store. However, data can not be migrated either from or to Basic Feature Data Store.

Data store summary

The creation, hosting, and management of image services is currently not supported for ArcGIS Location Platform accounts. Please contact Esri if you would like to host image services.