National Park Service Logo

Analyzed and Improved Geospatial Services Farm

The Organization: National Parks Service (NPS) GIS and Geospatial Services

 The National Park Service (NPS) is an agency of the United States federal government. It manages all U.S. national parks, many American national monuments, and other conservation and historical properties with various title designations. Maps of parks printed on brochures originally came to be to generate interest. Printed on each brochure was a map showing the parks and principal railroad connections.

The Problem and Solution: Analyzed and Improved Geospatial Services Farm

NPS requested Xentity to provide analysis, consulting, and training to help address major performance problems with the GIS Services farm. Xentity had deep experience in end-to-end strategy, design, solutions, and operations in other Federal Government GIS Service farms. Xentity provided the technical tactics on beyond the server administration guides. They also provided a test, measure, analyze and fix process (similar to a Deming Cycle tied to Agile Planning).

The Outcomes: GIS Services lower IT Footprint and Performance resolved

Xentity helped establish the test harness, put the measuring tools in place (i.e., JMeter), help prioritize the testing scenarios to analyze with varying thresholds, and supported the first two cycles on fixes. However, the fixes went beyond hardware recommendations and configuration. It also went into best practices on databases, the GIS Service modeling and parameters, and also looking into various models for organizing the features into services, VMs, and databases. Finally, the IT Footprint saw drastic reductions pending plans to implement and the performance for key services were immediately tuned and addressed.