About automation
Automation is the orchestration of tools, processes, and resources to function automatically and efficiently. It allows you to streamline your workflow and ensure that it is error proof and can be replicated each time with identical or predictable results.
Depending on your requirements, the need for automation could fall into a wide range of circumstances, such as the following:
- Publish the same set of content, users, groups, and so on, across a number of portals.
- List all items belonging to a particular user or group or matching a particular criterion such as name prefixes.
- List content that was published before a particular date. For instance, list all items created during the first quarter of last year, and create a table of their owner names and email addresses.
- Determine which web maps or scenes will break if you deleted a particular service.
- Periodically update content at predetermined times.
- Inspect all web maps and scenes, and update those that have broken links.
- Monitor and analyze the usage metrics of your services and take appropriate action.
No matter your use case, automation can quickly enhance your productivity and operational efficiency. Esri provides solutions to automate your ArcGIS Enterprise as described below.
ArcGIS Python API
Once your portal is set up to your specification, you can automate the population of your portal with users, groups, and items, as well as manage them on an on-going basis. Once set up, you can automate many tasks, such as those mentioned at the beginning of this topic. You can accomplish this using ArcGIS Python API. This API allows ArcGIS administrators, publishers, and users to leverage the Python environment to automate their workflows and perform repetitive tasks using scripts. To learn more about what you can do with this API, see Scripting with ArcGIS Python API.