Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a platform for analytics and data warehousing has gained significant adoption over the years. With SAS^® Visual Analytics being one of the preferred tools for data visualization and analytics, it is imperative to be able to deploy SAS Visual Analytics on AWS. This ensures swift analysis and reporting on large amounts of data with SAS Visual Analytics by minimizing the movement of data across environments. This paper focuses on installing SAS Visual Analytics 7.2 in an Amazon Web Services environment, migration of metadata objects and content from previous versions to the deployment on the cloud, and ensuring data security.

Since it was first released three years ago, SAS^® Environment Manager has been used widely in many customers' production environment. Customers are now familiar with the basic functions of the product. They are asking for more information about advanced topics such as how to manage users, roles, and permissions; how to secure the product; and how to interact with their existing system management tools in their enterprise environment. This paper addresses those advanced but practical issues from a real customer's perspective. The paper first briefly lists what's new in the most current release of SAS Environment Manager. It then discusses the new user management design introduced in the third maintenance release of SAS 9.4. We explain how that design addresses customers' concerns and the best practices for using that design and for setting up user roles and permissions. We also discuss the new process and best practices for configuring SSL for SAS Environment Manager. More and more customers have expressed an interest in integrating SAS Environment Manager with their own system management tools. Our discussion ends with explaining how customers can do that through the SNMP interface built into SAS Environment Manager.

Connecting database schemas to libraries in the SAS^® metadata is a very important part of setting up a functional and useful environment for business users. This task can be quite difficult for the untrained administrator. This paper addresses the key configuration items that often go unnoticed but can make a big difference. Using the wrong options can lead to poor database performance or even to a total lockdown, depending on the number of connections to the database.

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For any SAS^® Platform Administrator, the challenge is to ensure the right jobs run for the right users with the right resources at the right time. Running on a grid-enabled SAS platform greatly assists this task, allowing prioritization of processes to ensure an optimal mix of critical batch processing and interactive user sessions. A key feature of SAS^® Grid Computing 9.4 is grid options sets, which make it even easier to manage options, resources, and queues. Grid options sets allow different user groups to run SAS applications on a common shared SAS Application Server Context (such as SASApp), but the applications are still tailored to suit the requirements of each application and user group. Offering much more than just queue selection, grid options sets in SAS Grid Computing 9.4 now allow SAS Platform Administrators to effectively have 'conditional queues,' 'conditional configuration options,' and 'conditional resource requirements,' all centrally located and managed within a single SAS Application Server Context. This paper examines the benefits of SAS Grid Computing processing, looks at some of the issues encountered in previous versions of SAS Grid Computing, and explains how these issues are managed more effectively on a SAS 9.4 platform, thanks to SAS grid options sets.

As more of your work is performed in an off-premises cloud environment, understanding how to get the data you want to analyze and report on becomes important. In addition, working in a cloud environment like Amazon Web Services might be something that is new to you or to your organization when you use a product like SAS^® Visual Analytics. This presentation discusses how to get the best use out of cloud resources, how to efficiently transport information between systems, and how to continue to leverage data in an on-premises database management system (DBMS) in your future cloud system.

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Code review is an important tool for ensuring the quality and maintainability of an organization's ETL processes. This paper introduces a method that analyzes the metadata to assign an alert score to each job. For the jobs of each flow, the metadata is collected, giving information about the number of transformations in a job, the amount of user-written code, the number of loops, the number of empty description fields, whether naming conventions are followed, and so on. This is aggregated into complexity indicators per job. Together with other information about the jobs (e.g. the CPU-time used from logging applications) this information can be made available in SAS^® Visual Analytics, creating a dashboard that highlights areas for closer inspection.

Often SAS^® users within business units find themselves running wholly within a single production environment, where non-production environments are reserved for the technology support teams to roll out patches, maintenance releases, and so on. So what is available for business units to set up and manage their intra-platform business systems development life cycle (SDLC)? Another scenario is when a new platform is provisioned, but the business units are responsible for promoting their own content from the old to the new platform. How can this be done without platform administrator roles? This paper examines some typical issues facing business users trying to manage their SAS content, and it explores the capabilities of various SAS tools available to promote and manage metadata, mid-tier content, and SAS^® Enterprise Guide^® projects.

SAS^® Visual Analytics offers many new and exciting ways to look at your data. Users are able to load data at will to explore and ask questions of their data. But what happens if you need to prevent users from viewing all data? What can you do to prevent users from loading too much data? What happens if a user loads data that exceeds the hardware capacity of your environment? This session covers practical ways to limit available resources and secure SAS LASR data. Real-world scenarios are covered and attendees can participate in an open discussion.

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Historically, administration of your SAS^® Grid Manager environment has required interaction with a number of disparate applications including Platform RTM for SAS, SAS^® Management Console, and command line utilities. With the third maintenance release of SAS^® 9.4, you can now use SAS^® Environment Manager for all monitoring and management of your SAS Grid. The new SAS Environment Manager interface gives you the ability to configure the Load Sharing Facility (LSF), manage and monitor high-availability applications, monitor overall SAS Grid health, define event-based alerts, and much, much more through a single, unified, web-based interface.

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The SAS^® Deployment Backup and Recovery tool in the third maintenance release of SAS^® 9.4 helps SAS administrators to collectively take backups of important data artifacts in SAS deployments, which include SAS^® Metadata Server, SAS^® Content Server, SAS^® Web Infrastructure Platform Data Server, and physical data in the SAS configuration directory. The tool supports all types of deployments, from single-tier to multi-tier clustered heterogeneous host deployments. The new configuration options in the tool give administrators more control over the data that is being backed up, from the SAS tiers to the individual directory level. The new options allow administrators to filter out old log directories and to choose the databases to back up. This paper talks about not only how to use the configuration options but also how to mediate the effects that the SAS deployment configuration changes have on the backups and how to optimize the backups in terms of size and time.