Imagine your organization has been tasked to evaluate potential sites for a new warehouse. This evaluation is to be based on access to transportation, the presence of special restrictions such as nearby historical neighborhoods, access to restaurants and other facilities that employees may need, access to public transportation for employees, and nearby land use that may restrict or enhance development. How does your organization evaluate these sites in a quantifiable and defensible way? Of course, your organization needs data, but it also needs tools to analyze the data, measure geographic relationships, and help answer the question. This process is known as spatial analysis.
Many patterns and relationships aren't always obvious from looking at a map. In some cases, there may be too much data to present coherently. The way you display the data on the map can change the patterns you see. Spatial analysis tools allow you to quantify patterns and relationships in the data and display the results as maps, tables, and charts. These tools allow you to provide portal members with a fast, accessible way to perform many common spatial analysis workflows.
The tools you'll use to perform spatial analysis are actually hosted as a series of tasks in ArcGIS Server. To expose the tools to members of your portal, complete the steps in the Configure the portal to perform analysis section.
Members of your organization will have no direct interaction with ArcGIS Server; they will only use the Portal for ArcGIS website to perform analysis. For example, members will use the analysis tools to perform common analytical functions such as finding hot spots, locating streets and addresses, finding a place, routing, or accessing a geodatabase. By enabling analysis, you empower members of your organization to answer questions and make important decisions using more than visual analysis.
To learn more about accessing and running the tools, see Perform analysis in the Portal for ArcGIS help.
Configure the portal to perform analysis
The spatial analysis tools are hosted as a series of tasks in ArcGIS Server. For members of your organization to use these tasks to perform analysis in Portal for ArcGIS, you'll need to set up a base ArcGIS Enterprise deployment and grant members privileges to perform analysis. The portal's hosting server does the work of processing analysis requests, storing the results in ArcGIS Data Store, and returning results to members in the Portal for ArcGIS website. You cannot use a hosting server configured with an enterprise geodatabase for this purpose.
The following instructions may require changes to the way you've deployed ArcGIS in your organization; review them carefully before proceeding. To configure the portal to perform analysis, follow these steps:
Note:
You can configure analysis for a portal that has been upgraded from an earlier version. Your portal must have a hosting server configured with ArcGIS Data Store. Follow the steps in Upgrade Portal for ArcGIS, and then go to Organization > Settings > Servers and locate the server site. Click the options button 
, select Configure server role, use the toggle button to enable the hosting server, and click Save. You can then proceed to step 2 below.
- If you do not already have a base ArcGIS Enterprise deployment configured, set one up. See Tutorial: Set up a base ArcGIS Enterprise deployment for more details.
- Grant members privileges to perform analysis.
- Optionally, configure additional utility services with your portal. Note that tools that require network utility services require that all of the network utility services be registered with the portal. For more information about the utility services, see Utility services.
Note:
If the necessary utility services for a tool are not configured, the tool will not be visible in the portal user interface. The tool will also not be visible if a portal member does not have the correct permissions to use that tool.
Resources
Use the following resources to learn more about analysis: