Creating an ArcGIS Online Outage Map – Easy as 1, 2, 3

August 12, 2012 — Jeff Mertz

In this installment of articles related to ArcGIS Online, we will cover how to easily create an outage map for your customers. The beauty of publishing this using ArcGIS Online is that the map can be consumed from any device, as it is web-driven. The technologies we will be using are: Outage data from Telvents’ Responder™ application; ArcGIS Server for exposing the data to the cloud; and ArcGIS Online for publishing the final map to your customer.

Step 1: Gathering Your Data

A fair number of our customers use Telvents’ Responder™ for managing their outage data. In this example, we will first create a map that shows the location of outage incidents. Starting with a blank map, and following Telvents’ configuration guide, we can quickly generate points that directly come from the Responder™ data as shown below:

creating-agol-outage-map-outage-pointsFor simplicity, we will just use some basic data from Responder™ – premise, cut-wire and device incidents. When starting from a clean slate, make sure that your coordinate system is defined correctly or else you won’t see any data once you publish your map! (And, ArcGIS Online will fail to load your layer.)

Step 2: ArcGIS Map Service

Now that you have created your basic incident map, it is time to configure a new service for it. This service will eventually be used by ArcGIS Online to retrieve the outage data – in real time. Using this approach, you will not need to worry about storing and refreshing your data in the cloud.

After configuring our new service, we can verify it by visiting the ArcGIS Services Directory page:

creating-agol-outage-map-arcgis-services-directory

And we can see the data by browsing to the Outage service and using the ArcGIS JavaScript link:

 

creating-agol-outage-map-arcgis-javascript-link

Here are the results:

creating-agol-outage-map-javascript-results

Do those data points look familiar? Of course they do! They are the same ones we saw in Step 1, when we created the map document. We now have our outage data ready to be consumed by the ArcGIS Online application.

Step 3: Creating the ArcGIS Online Map

Recently, Skye Perry wrote an article titled ArcGIS Online at 10.1 and Why You Should Care. In that article, he talked about how you can use data from a variety of sources. For this example, we are going to use a combination of a public street map and our new outage service outlined in Step 2 above. Here’s how to do it.

1.  After you log in, click “New Map” in the header.

creating-agol-outage-map-new-map

2.  Click Add / Search for Layers.

3.  Search for a street layer. Type “street” in the “Find” text box and click “Go”. Then click “Add” to add the “World Street Map” layer. When the new layer is loaded click “Done Adding Layers” button.

creating-agol-outage-map-search

4.  Now add a new layer from the web, which will be your new outage service. To do this, browse to your public-facing URL for the outage rest service, then copy the URL to the dialog as shown below:

creating-agol-outage-map-add-layer-from-web

 

creating-agol-outage-map-add-layer-from-web-dialogue

Then click “Add Layer”. If everything is configured correctly, the layer will be added to the map and show in the “Contents” on the left hand side.

creating-agol-outage-map-new-layer-contents

5.  Zoom in to see your data. In the screenshot below, we see the two premise

incidents:

creating-agol-outage-map-zoom-layer

Here we see the device incidents:

creating-agol-outage-map-view-incidents
In this example data, there were calls ingested into the Responder™ system that rolled up to the substation breakers.

 

 

After you save your map, you will need to make it public in order for your customers to be able to use it. To do this, go to “My Content”, select the map, and click “Share”. You will see the following dialog:

creating-agol-outage-map-share

You will need to check the “Everyone (public)” option and click “OK”. A unique URL will be created for this map and you can then embed it in your company website so customers can easily view it.

That’s it for the basics of getting outage data to ArcGIS Online. In a future installment, we’ll show how to further configure this application to maximize its effectiveness for your customers.

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Jeff Mertz

DBA Architect

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