Utility services enable specific functionality in your organization, for example, printing maps, locating addresses, calculating areas, finding directions, and performing analysis. Some utility services include default services, but you can also use your own services. To learn how to configure your organization to use utility services, see Configure utility services.
Printing
Print services allow you to print or preview your web maps. You can print maps from Map Viewer, web apps created in ArcGIS Web AppBuilder, or with ArcGIS Configurable Apps templates. Web apps created with a template or in Web AppBuilder use the organization's print service in their print widgets. When you click Print in Map Viewer, the print service creates printable documents with the layouts available in that print service. You can also create custom print layout templates and share them with the organization's layout template group to make the templates available for printing in Map Viewer.
Geometry
Geometry services perform the calculations necessary to do spatial analysis such as buffering and calculating area. The organization uses an ArcGIS Online geometry service by default. This default ArcGIS Online geometry service is not recommended for use on production deployments. You must update the geometry utility service for your ArcGIS Enterprise deployment to use the preconfigured geometry service of the hosting server or one of your federated servers. You can also use a custom ArcGIS Server geometry service.
GeoEnrichment
The GeoEnrichment service allows you to get facts about a location or area. Using GeoEnrichment, you can get information about the people, places, and businesses in a specific area or within a certain distance or drive time from a location. More specifically, by submitting a point or polygon to the GeoEnrichment service, you can retrieve the demographics and other relevant characteristics associated with the surrounding area. You can also use the geoenrichment service to obtain additional geographic context (for example, the ZIP code of a location) and geographic boundaries (for example, the geometry for a drive-time service area). Currently, the service is available for Canada, the United States, and a number of European countries. Other countries will be added over time.
This service allows you to answer questions about locations that you can't answer with maps alone. For example: What kind of people live here? What do people like to do in this area? What are their habits and lifestyles? What kind of businesses are in this area?
Site analysis is a popular application of this type of data enrichment. For example, the GeoEnrichment service can be used to study the population that would be affected by the development of a new community center in their neighborhood. With the service, the proposed site can be submitted, and the demographics and other relevant characteristics associated with the area around the site will be returned. For more information, see the ArcGIS REST API documentation.
Directions and Routing
Routing services allow you to perform several types of spatial analysis on transportation networks, such as finding the best route across a city, finding the closest emergency vehicle or facility, identifying a service area around a location, or servicing a set of orders with a fleet of vehicles. You can also find directions between two or more locations. Your organization's route utility service is used for the directions functionality in web maps.
Learn more about routing utility service
ArcGIS Enterprise is not configured with any routing services, by default.
Learn more about configuring routing services on an ArcGIS Enterprise portal
Elevation and hydrology
The Elevation Analysis services allow you to perform various operations for elevation analysis (Profile, Viewshed, and Summarize Elevation) and hydrology analysis (Watershed and Trace Downstream). The data these services reference is hosted and curated by Esri. For more information, see the ArcGIS REST API documentation.
Cached Elevation Image Service
The Cached Elevation Image Service configures your elevation services for 3D applications. You can publish an elevation layer to be used as an elevation service. To add an elevation service to your portal, enter a service URL and click Add service. You can also reorder or delete your elevation services.
Geocoding
Geocode services are used to search for and locate addresses and places on a map. The organization is preconfigured to use the ArcGIS World Geocoding Service hosted on ArcGIS Online, which allows you to find and map a specified address or place-name.
You can also configure the organization to use a geocode service through your ArcGIS Online organizational account (including ArcGIS World Geocoding Service) or your own geocode service enabled by ArcGIS Server. This is appropriate in the following scenarios:
- You need to geocode a large number of addresses at once (batch geocoding), such as when you add a .csv file that contains addresses to your web map or when using ArcGIS for Office to map a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. To learn how to set up batch geocoding, see Configure the portal to geocode addresses.
- You need to geocode addresses or places based on your own data.
- You do not have an internet connection or are not allowed to rely on external geocode services for security or other reasons.