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Rayburn Electric Cooperative (REC) is a trusted, Member-focused Generation and Transmission Cooperative dedicated to providing its Members with dependable and cost-effective wholesale electric energy solutions. With over 265 miles of transmission line located exclusively within the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), REC owns and operates a robust infrastructure that ensures the seamless delivery of electricity.
Highlights
- Challenge – REC needed a solution to proactively monitor the health of an Enterprise GIS system that was growing rapidly
- Solution – ArcGIS Monitor
- Result – An Enterprise GIS system that is performant, future-proof and meets the growing demands of the business
GIS at REC has grown leaps and bounds and become a Level 1 system in their IT landscape. REC has been at the forefront of embracing technology to meet the growing demands of the business. In the last few years, REC has gone from using pins on Google Earth to a fully cloud-hosted and managed ArcGIS Enterprise system. Through ArcGIS Enterprise, efficient electric asset management, real-time data ingestion, and integration with myriad data sources, GIS propels operations at REC; all this while supporting business users through map-based visualization aids such as web maps, operation dashboards and mobile applications.
Access to real-time information assists C-suite stakeholders in decision making and reduces field users’ response time. A cloud-hosted ArcGIS system guarantees uninterrupted availability with the ability to scale with increased usage.
Challenges
Recognizing how mission-critical GIS is to their operations, REC needed a robust solution to monitor the health of their ArcGIS system. The decision to implement ArcGIS Monitor was a proactive measure to identify potential events, obtain better system usage metrics, and maintain and enhance overall system health.
Dylan Campbell, Senior GIS Developer, says, “GIS is a core part of our mission including vegetation management, inspections, finding routes for new transmission lines and locations for new switchyards and substations, displaying live conditions of our electric grid, and assisting in the identification of events and the response to them, among many others.”
ArcGIS Monitor was recognized as a necessary component from the start. REC’s cloud-based GIS environment not only hosts ArcGIS Enterprise, but also SAFE software’s Feature Manipulation Engine (FME). Given this scenario, real-time monitoring and alerting became even more important for both systems to work in conjunction with each other.
Campbell says, “Our GIS system plays a key role in helping maintain and improve the reliability of the electric grid, which in turn means we need to look after the reliability of our GIS system.”
Figure 1: Dylan Campbell with the ArcGIS Monitor analysis view and Metrics
ArcGIS powered dashboards and web applications enable REC to track the status and health of their transmission infrastructure. This is crucial in helping to meet energy demand. Furthermore, ArcGIS mobile applications such as ArcGIS Workforce, ArcGIS Field Maps and ArcGIS Survey123 streamline field operations.
Polling feature status at regular intervals and displaying real-time data using specific symbology, one could immediately identify issue severity levels and assignment status such as ‘open,’ ‘in progress,’ or ‘closed’ through web maps and dashboards.
Given the critical nature of their operations, it was essential for REC to ensure 24/7 availability of the ArcGIS system, as any downtime was simply unacceptable. The adoption of ArcGIS Monitor became a pivotal step toward enhancing operational efficiency and maintaining high availability in their GIS operations.
Solution
REC partnered with CyberTech, an Esri Gold Partner, to implement ArcGIS Monitor. CyberTech provides hosting and managed services for REC’s ArcGIS system, in Microsoft Azure. ArcGIS Monitor was a firm recommendation by CyberTech during the architecture design phase. Having implemented ArcGIS Monitor for several other customers, CyberTech understands the importance and value of ArcGIS Monitor in running a mission-critical ArcGIS system.
REC’s Enterprise Agreement with Esri and a tight integration with other Esri products in the ecosystem, expedited the adoption of ArcGIS Monitor. During implementation, the REC team reviewed and provided feedback based on business needs.
Figure 2: Example of components configured with ArcGIS Monitor
CyberTech provides unified access to application-specific information and metrics, simplifying monitoring tasks and improving issue resolution. The implementation of ArcGIS Monitor allows REC to customize alerts through the web app. These alerts help Dylan and their GIS colleague, Kyle Eastman, to focus on critical issues by filtering notifications to only those that required immediate attention, streamlining the troubleshooting process.
Figure 3: Example of Alerts and Warnings
By distributing workloads across multiple servers, REC established a high-availability setup that prevents any individual server from being overwhelmed, effectively reducing the load on each component. With ArcGIS Monitor in place, they can set triggering points for system health monitoring, track CPU, RAM, and disk usage for each machine, oversee service performance, and generate usage reports and dashboards for informative decision making.
Campbell says “We recently upgraded to a high availability environment with the goal of improving the reliability of our GIS environment to make sure our operators and other personnel have 24/7 access and to minimize downtime during upgrades and patches. This made our use of ArcGIS Monitor even more important as it provides an easy way to monitor and alert, even with a complex environment of two systems running in parallel.”
Benefits
The alerts generated by ArcGIS Monitor have helped REC effectively manage their expansive GIS environment while ensuring the high availability required for operations. The GIS team has experienced increased efficiency in resolving critical issues before they impact users, allowing them to address outages and service disruptions more swiftly.
The proactive nature of these alerts has notably reduced stress on their operations and maintenance teams. Real-time notifications about potential issues ensure that the team is informed even when they are not actively working.
While speaking about their overall experience with ArcGIS Monitor, Campbell says, “When you pair ArcGIS Monitor with a partner like CyberTech, it’s a perfect combo. CyberTech manages monitoring, improving, and maintaining of our GIS environment for us. That means this combo of ArcGIS Monitor and CyberTech allows our small two-person GIS team to dedicate our energy to data maintenance, analysis, and developing new tools and applications. ArcGIS Monitor is also a great tool for visualizing what is going on with our system so that we can understand quickly how our environment is performing. ArcGIS Monitor has been a key tool in understanding when we do need to add more resources or upgrade our ArcGIS Environment.”
Figure 4: ArcGIS System Usage Statistics
The implementation of ArcGIS Monitor by CyberTech has ensured 24/7 availability of GIS components crucial for maintaining a high-availability ArcGIS Enterprise system. To summarize, Campbell says, “ArcGIS Monitor is an important tool for us to be able to both quickly identify any issues with our Enterprise system and to investigate and find improvements we can make. Our GIS system is a mission critical system as we provide near real-time conditions and alerting of Rayburn’s Electric Grid and situational awareness that assists in responding to events. Monitor helps us in achieving our goal of having our system available 24/7.”
