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What is ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Server?

ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Server is a big data processing and analysis capability of ArcGIS Enterprise. It provides a distributed computing framework that powers a collection of analysis tools for analyzing large volumes of data. Through aggregation, regression, detection, clustering, and so on, you can visualize, understand, and act upon your big data. GeoAnalytics Server allows you to gain insights that may otherwise be hidden in your data, such as patterns, trends, and anomalies.

GeoAnalytics Server works with your vector (points, lines, and polygons) and tabular data and can read directly from CSV files, .txt files, shapefiles, and big data sources such as cloud storage, HDFS, and Hive. GeoAnalytics Server also works with your existing GIS data, using feature layers as input.

GeoAnalytics Server tools focus on the different spatial analysis approaches you can take with big data: Analyze Patterns, Find Locations, Manage Data, Summarize Data, Use Proximity, and Data Enrichment. Whether you need to complete a quick spatial join, run regression analysis on multiple datasets, or find areas of data clustering, the GeoAnalytics Server toolbox provides many options to explore your data. In addition to the provided tools, you can customize analysis to complete your workflows and analyses through Python, using distributed computation and tools on your GeoAnalytics Server.

All analysis is performed on your GeoAnalytics Server, and results can be stored either in ArcGIS Enterprise so you can continue to explore, analyze, map, and share those results, or to your own data sources for further processing.

GeoAnalytics Server uses

GeoAnalytics Server is helpful when you find that your current GIS analyses aren’t processing your data fast enough. It accelerates traditional workflows so you can get results quicker. GeoAnalytics Server is also helpful when you have large datasets and you need to analyze them spatially. GeoAnalytics Server is a good solution for the following:

  • Your existing tools and workflows aren’t processing your data fast enough.
  • Your data is growing and you need a better way of managing and analyzing it.
  • You need to transform your data into something more manageable to use in other GIS analyses (for example using ArcGIS Pro analysis tools).
  • Your data has a lot of noise and you want to explore it to identify important points.
  • You want to use spatial statistical analysis and machine learning tools suitable for large datasets.

Examples of analysis with ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Server

GeoAnalytics tools are versatile across industries. The following examples illustrate how GeoAnalytics Server can be used with different goals in mind:

  • As a crime analyst, you can understand the location and time of crimes in your state, as well as the proximity of crimes to areas of interest such as events, police stations, and city centers. Related tools are Aggregate Points and Join Features.
  • As a manager at a state Department of Transportation, you can analyze decades of traffic and crash data to determine the interstates with the most incidents. You can also analyze when certain vehicles were speeding and breaking, and correlate them with the locations of vehicular accidents. Related tools are Find Point Clusters and Reconstruct Tracks.
  • As an environmental scientist, you can identify times and locations of high ozone levels across the country in a dataset of millions of static sensor reads. Related tools are Detect Incidents and Create Space Time Cube.
  • As an electric utility engineer, you can determine how close lightning strikes were to your electrical lines and substations. Related tools are Create Buffers and Join Features.
  • As a water utility technician, you can sort through work orders for leaks, and join them to a dataset of soil types to determine if leaks have occurred in areas where there is particularly corrosive soil. Related tools are Create Space Time Cube and Find Hot Spots.
  • As a retail lead, you can experiment with realigning your trade areas based on demographics, past sales, or distance to and from a store. You can also see how store performance is similar and dissimilar across your portfolio. Related tools are Dissolve Boundaries and Find Similar Locations.
  • As a city GIS analyst, you can use ArcGIS GeoEvent Server to ingest GPS data on all city vehicles, like public works vehicles and snow plows. See where vehicles have travelled, areas that have with less coverage, and instances where vehicles exceeded the speed limit. Related tools are Reconstruct Tracks, Aggregate Points, and Detect Incidents.

GeoAnalytics Server enables distributed analysis on a single machine or across a set of three machines. With this distributed computing power, your analysis can be performed more quickly and with larger quantities of data than could previously be computed on a desktop machine. Results from your analysis can be stored in ArcGIS Enterprise for use in web maps, apps, and other information products, or you can write back to your own data store.

To get started with GeoAnalytics Server, install an ArcGIS Enterprise base deployment and ArcGIS Data Store configured as the spatiotemporal big data store. If you will use three machines in your GeoAnalytics Server site, you should also set up a three-machine spatiotemporal big data store. For details on how to set up your deployment to enable GeoAnalytics Server, see Set up GeoAnalytics Server and Best practices for GeoAnalytics Server sites.

The GeoAnalytics Server tools are available through ArcGIS REST API, ArcGIS Python API, ArcGIS Pro, and ArcGIS Enterprise portal Map Viewer.