Identifying missing tiles on basemap on ArcGIS Server?

Question

I have a basemap service on ArcGIS Server 10.1 where after doing a cache update (exploded cache), some of the tiles are missing. I have added a "missing tiles.png" so that it shows where the missing tiles are.

However, i have a very large area cached at 3 scales.

Using ArcGIS Server or ArcGIS Desktop (Advanced level license) is there a way to find out which tiles are missing and at what scales?

The cache has been created using my own tiling scheme file (created through ArcGIS Desktop).

Ideally I would like to know which tiles from my tiling scheme are missing from my basemap service cache. Finding them visually will be extremely time consuming.

I've looked in the "Status.gdb" for the cached service, but there doesn't seem to be anything useful in there to tell me where the data is missing.

I've tried doing a cache update to "Recreate empty tiles", but this doesn't seem to work, and as it is a very large dataset it takes days to process.

I was hoping to be able to extract a polygon/number of polygons for the areas of missing data and send those in as the AOI for a cache update, as this will be a much smaller subset of the data.

Answer 1

You could view the cache in the javascript viewer while running the web traffic debugger fiddler. It will throw errors where it fails to find tiles. You can then look at the request folder locations to help you recreate the tiles

Answer 2

Some times a missing tile isn't really missing. ArcGIS sometimes creates a completely black tile. You can identify these tiles by finding all of the JPEG files in your exploded cache that have a minimum file size. This can be done by sorting your tile cache directories by size.