This paper illustrates a high-level infrastructure discussion with some explanation of the SAS^® codes used to implement a configurable batch framework for managing and updating the data rows and row-level permissions in SAS^® OLAP Cube Studio. The framework contains a collection of reusable, parameter-driven Base SAS^® macros, Base SAS custom programs, and UNIX or LINUX shell scripts. This collection manages the typical steps and processes used for manipulating SAS files and for executing SAS statements. The Base SAS macro collection contains a group of utility macros that includes: concurrent /parallel processing macros, SAS^® Metadata Repository macros, SAS^® Scalable Performance Data Engine table macros, table lookup macros, table manipulation macros, and other macros. There is also a group of OLAP-related macros that includes OLAP utility macros and OLAP permission table processing macros.

When promoting metadata in large packages from SAS^® Data Integration Studio between environments, metadata and the underlying physical data can become out of sync. This can result in metadata items that cannot be opened by users because SAS^® has thrown an error. It often falls to the SAS administrator to resolve the synchronization issues when they might not have been responsible for promoting the metadata items in the first place. In this paper, we will discuss a simple macro that can be used to compare the table metadata to that of the physical tables, and any anomalies will be noted.

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Modernizing SAS^® assets within an enterprise is key to reducing costs and improving productivity. Modernization implies consolidating multiple SAS environments into a single shared enterprise SAS deployment. While the benefits of modernization are clear, the management of a single-enterprise deployment is sometimes a struggle between business units who once had autonomy and IT that is now responsible for managing this shared infrastructure. The centralized management and control of a SAS deployment is based on SAS metadata. This paper provides a practical approach to the shared management of a centralized SAS deployment using SAS^® Management Console. It takes into consideration the day-to-day needs of the business and IT requirements including centralized security, monitoring, and management. This document defines what resources are contained in SAS metadata, what responsibilities should be centrally controlled, and the pros and cons of distributing the administration of metadata content across the enterprise. This document is intended as a guide for SAS administrators and assumes that you are familiar with the concepts and terminology introduced in SAS^® 9.4 Intelligence Platform: Security Administration Guide.

As the SAS^® platform becomes increasingly metadata-driven, it becomes increasingly important to get the structures and controls surrounding the metadata repository correct. This presentation aims to point out some of the considerations and potential pitfalls of working with the metadata infrastructure. It also suggests some solutions that have been used with the aim of making this process as simple as possible.

As a SAS^® Intelligence Platform Administrator, have your eyes ever glazed over as you performed repetitive tasks in SAS^® Management Console or some other administrative user interface? Perhaps you're setting up metadata for a new department, managing a set of backups, or promoting content between dev, test, and prod environments. Did you know there is a large library of batch utilities to help you automate many of these common administration tasks? This paper explores content reporting and management utilities, such as viewing authorizations or relationships between content, as well as administrative tasks such as analyzing, creating, or deleting metadata repositories or performing a backup of the system. The batch utilities can be incorporated into scripts so that you can run them repeatedly on either an ad hoc or scheduled basis. Give your mouse a rest and save yourself some time.

The first task to accomplish our SAS^® 9.4 installation goal is to create an Amazon Web Services (AWS) secured EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud 2) instance called a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). Through a series of wizard-driven dialog boxes, the SAS administrator selects virtual CPUs (vCPUs, which have about a 2:1 ratio to cores ), memory, storage, and network performance considerations via regional availability zones. Then, there is a prompt to create a VPC that will be housed within the EC2 instance, along with a major component called subnets. A step to create a security group is next, which enables the SAS administrator to specify all of the VPC firewall port rules required for the SAS 9.4 application. Next, the EC2 instance is reviewed and a security key pair is either selected or created. Then the EC2 launches. At this point, Internet connectivity to the EC2 instance is granted by attaching an Internet gateway and its route table to the VPC and allocating and associating an elastic IP address along with a public DNS. The second major task involves establishing connectivity to the EC2 instance and a method of download for SAS software. In the case of the Linux Red Hat instance created here, putty is configured to use the EC2's security key pair (.ppk file). In order to transfer files securely to the EC2 instance, a tool such as WinSCP is installed and uses the putty connection for secure FTP. The Linux OS is then updated, and then VNCServer is installed and configured so that the SAS administrator can use a GUI. Finally, a Firefox web browser is installed to download the SAS^® Download Manager. After downloading the SAS Download Manager, a SAS depot directory is created on the Linux file system and the SAS Download Manager is run once we have provided the software order number and SAS installation key. Once the SAS software depot has been loaded, we can verify the success of the SAS software depot's download by running the SAS depot checker. The next pre-installatio n task is to take care of some Linux OS housekeeping. Local users (for example, the SAS installation ID), sas, and other IDs such as sassrv, lsfadmin, lsfuser, and sasdemo are created. Specific directory permissions are set for the installer ID sas. The ulimit setting for open files and max user processes are increased and directories are created for a SAS installation home and configuration directory. Some third-party tools such as python, which are required for SAS 9.4, are installed. Then Korn shell and other required Linux packages are installed. Finally, the SAS Deployment Manager installation wizard is launched and the multiple dialog boxes are filled out, with many defaults accepted and Next clicked. SAS administrators should consider running the SAS Deployment Manager twice, first to solely install the SAS software, and then later to configure. Finally, after SAS Deployment Manager completion, SAS post-installation tasks are completed.

SAS^® Environment Manager helps SAS^® administrators and system administrators manage SAS resources and effectively monitor the environment. SAS Environment Manager provides administrators with a centralized location for accessing and monitoring the SAS^® Customer Intelligence environment. This enables administrators to identify problem areas and to maintain an in-depth understanding of the day-to-day activities on the system. It is also an excellent way to predict the usage and growth of the environment for scalability. With SAS Environment Manager, administrators can set up monitoring for CI logs (for example, SASCustIntelCore6.3.log, SASCustIntelStudio6.3.log) and other general logs from the SAS^® Intelligence Platform. This paper contains examples for administrators who support SAS Customer Intelligence to set up this type of monitoring. It provides recommendations for approaches and for how to interpret the results from SAS Environment Manager.

EBI administrators who are new to SAS^® Visual Analytics and used to the logging capability of the SAS^® OLAP Server might be wondering how they can get their SAS^® LASR™ Analytic Server to produce verbose log files. While the SAS LASR Analytic Server logs differ from those produced by the SAS OLAP Server, the SAS LASR Analytic Server log contains information about each request made to LASR tables and can be a great data source for administrators looking to learn more about how their SAS Visual Analytics deployments are being used. This session will discuss how to quickly enable logging for your SAS LASR Analytic Server in SAS Visual Analytics 6.4. You will see what information is available to a SAS administrator in these logs, how they can be parsed into data sets with SAS code, then loaded back into the SAS LASR Analytic Server to create SAS Visual Analytics explorations and reports.

SAS^® platform administrators always feel the pinch of not having information about how much storage space is occupied by each user on one specific file system or in the entire environment. Sometimes the platform administrator does not have access to all users' folders, so they have to plan for the worst. There are multiple approaches to tackle this problem. One of the better methods is to initiate an alert mechanism to notify a user when they are in the top 10 file system users on the system.

Smoke detectors operate by comparing actual air quality to expected air quality standards and immediately alerting occupants when smoke or particle levels exceed established thresholds. Just as rapid identification of smoke (that is, poor air quality) can detect harmful fire and facilitate its early extinguishment, rapid detection of poor quality data can highlight data entry or ingestion errors, faulty logic, insufficient or inaccurate business rules, or process failure. Aspects of data quality--such as availability, completeness, correctness, and timeliness--should be assessed against stated requirements that account for the scope, objective, and intended use of data products. A single outlier, an accidentally locked data set, or even subtle modifications to a data structure can cause a robust extract-transform-load (ETL) infrastructure to grind to a halt or produce invalid results. Thus, a mature data infrastructure should incorporate quality assurance methods that facilitate robust processing and quality data products, as well as quality control methods that monitor and validate data products against their stated requirements. The SAS^® Smoke Detector represents a scalable, generalizable solution that assesses the availability, completeness, and structure of persistent SAS data sets, ideal for finished data products or transactional data sets received with standardized frequency and format. Like a smoke detector, the quality control dashboard is not intended to discover the source of the blaze, but rather to sound an alarm to stakeholders that data have been modified, locked, deleted, or otherwise corrupted. Through rapid detection and response, the fidelity of data is increased as well as the responsiveness of developers to threats to data quality and validity.

As SAS^® products become more web-oriented and sophisticated, SAS administrators face an increased challenge to manage their SAS middle-tier environments. They want to know the answers to important critical questions when planning, installing, configuring, deploying, and administrating their SAS products. They also need to meet the requirements of high performance, high availability, increased security, maintainability, and more. In this paper, we identify the most common and challenging questions that most of our administrators and customers have asked. These questions range across topics such as SAS middle-tier architecture, clustering, performance, security, and administration using SAS^® Environment Manger. These questions come from many sources such as technical support, consultants, and internal customer experience testing teams. The specific questions include: what is new in SAS 9.4 mid-tier infrastructure and why that is better for me; should I use the SAS Web Server or can I use another third party Web Server in my deployment; where can I deploy customer dynamic web applications and static contents; what are the SAS JRE, SAS Web Server, SAS Web Application Server upgrade policy and process; how to architect and configure to achieve High Availability for EBI and VA; how to install, update or add my products for cluster members; how can I tune the mid-tier performance and improve the start-up time of my SAS Web Application Server; what options are available for configuring SSL; what is the security policy, what security patches are available and how to apply them; how can I manage my mid-tier infrastructure and applications and how the user and account are managed in SAS Environment Manager? The paper will present detailed answers for these questions and also point out where you can find more information. We believe that with the answers to these questions, you, SAS administrators, can better implement and manage your SAS environment with a higher confide nce and satisfaction.