A tour of the ArcGIS Server site

Now that you have an ArcGIS Server site running, let's take a quick tour to give you a feel for what's there.

1. Be sure you've given your machine Instance enough time to get booted up and get your site started.
2. From your web browser, visit your Manager URL, which will look like, https://namegeog865####.e-education.psu.edu/server/manager/. (Substitute your own name and semester, of course.)
   
   Note: Sometimes it takes a few minutes after you've started your site for Manager to become available. If you get a blank screen or an error, wait a few minutes and try again.
   
   The nice thing about Manager is that you can run it from any computer that has an Internet connection. Later on, you'll learn how to make a remote desktop connection into your EC2 instance, but some administrative functions are exposed in Manager and don't require the hassle of remote desktop.
3. Log in to Manager using the site administrator credentials you designated in the Cloud Formation Template.
4. Click the Services tab and Manage Services subtab, then examine the pre-generated services that ArcGIS configures for you.
   
   There is a SampleWorldCities map service that you can preview by hovering over the thumbnail icon and clicking View.
5. Back in the list of services, you should see a Sharing Properties icon to the right of the SampleWorldCities service. Click the icon and check the box next to Everyone. This defines the service as public and available to everyone browsing your server, regardless of whether they are logged in. By default, services are set to only be visible to their author when signed in.
6. From the left-hand list of service folders, click System. These services (Caching Controllers, Publishing Tools, etc.) are used internally by ArcGIS Server when publishing services, building tiled map services (which you'll learn about in Lesson 6), and so forth. You don't have to do anything directly with these services, and you should leave the ones running that are running and leave the ones stopped that are stopped.
7. From the list of folders on the left, click Utilities. You can optionally start the PrintingTools service to include printing functionality in web applications that you build. This service takes all the layers in a web map and makes a single printable image, which is not always an easy task to program on your own when the layers are coming from different web services.
   
   Another pre-generated service called Geometry helps with simple measurement and editing operations if you are programming web applications. The GeocodingTools service is used for finding addresses and is associated with Portal for ArcGIS, another part of ArcGIS Enterprise that we'll learn about in a future lesson. Finally, the Search service allows for creating a searchable index of your organization's geographic data.
8. Click the Site tab and the Server Configuration subtab.
   
   Here you can view technical information about how your site is configured.
   
   Notice the Directories and Configuration Store locations. These are key folders required by the ArcGIS Server site which you may have to prepare and configure if you ever set up ArcGIS Server on premises. Cloud Formation creates shared folders for these and grants the ArcGIS Server account permissions to them (Cloud Formation also created the ArcGIS Server account for you).
   
   The Data Store menu item is also important. Here you need to add a list of folders and databases that you'll be using with your web services.
9. Click the Security tab.
   
   If you have services that need to be restricted to certain subgroups of users, you can configure your list of users in this section of Manager. Some organizations import their existing list of Windows users to ArcGIS Server, although using Manager you can alternatively set up a list of users from scratch. Once you have a list of users, you place them in roles and then lock down your services to allow only certain roles. You can also grant roles privileges to administer ArcGIS Server or publish services.
   
   The above procedures are beyond the scope of this course but can be explored in your final project if you would like. In the course exercises, you'll have just one user who can log into Manager, which is the primary site administrator that you designated in Cloud Formation. Anyone who has the URL to your site will be able to view your web services because by default there are no rules restricting access to your web services.
10. Click the Logs tab.
    
    This is where ArcGIS Server writes messages about what it is doing. The logs can be an invaluable troubleshooting tool, and you should return to this screen whenever you run into a problem you can't diagnose. The server can write very detailed messages down to the coordinates and draw time of every single map and layer it creates for every user. However, for performance and for ease of traversing the log messages, the logs are configured to only write Errors and Warnings by default.
     

You should now have a good feel for what's running on your ArcGIS Server site and the settings available there. The next item of business is to log into the EC2 instance itself and move some data there. This will allow you to publish your own web services on the ArcGIS Server site.