A day in the life of Utah’s ArcGIS Server Basemaps 2014

On Wednesday, November 6, 2013 we wrote about and displayed some charts displaying usage statistics for our basemaps. A year has passed and we have updated our graphs and included a few new ones. This year our usage stats were pulled from the first Wednesday in November which happened to be the 5th.

web application basemap usage

Here you can see that the Terrain basemap is the most popular among web applications. Web developers seem to enjoy this basemap for it's reference data, muted tones, and overall good looks. Another interesting take away here is the 55% increase in the number of requested tiles from the previous year.

arc map basemap usage

When users are using desktop software things change. This may be because users tend to have their own reference data or can easily add it. The Hybrid map overtakes Terrain and the Imagery moves into second place as a clean slate to start overlaying reference data. Imagery is very popular amongst the desktop users and must be very important and useful for getting their job done effectively.

tile requests per user

Over the course of a typical day, some end users, be they GIS staff or web applications, use the base map services in large volumes. Others end users only make a few requests and then move on. These users still make up the majority; Find what they were looking for and leave. The biggest difference between this year and last is the 70% increase in unique users.

top referrers

This graph shows where most of the traffic for basemap tiles was coming from on this particular day. It was an election month so the elections site took first place. Our mapserv hosted applications came in second. The breakup of other state agency usage is quite interesting with ArcGIS Online becoming a presence.

You can find more information about our basemaps on our website. If you want to interact with these charts, the are hosted on GitHub.