Migration to a SAS^® Grid Computing environment provides many advantages. However, such migration might not be free from challenges especially considering users' pre-migration routines and programming practices. While SAS^® provides good graphical user interface solutions (for example, SAS^® Enterprise Guide^®) to develop and submit the SAS code to SAS Grid Computing, some situations might need command-line batch submission of a group of related SAS programs in a particular sequence. Saving individual log and output files for each program might also be a favorite routine in many organizations. SAS has provided the SAS Grid Manager Client Utility and SASGSUB commands to enable command-line submission of SAS programs to the grid. However, submitting a sequence of SAS programs in a conventional batch program style and getting individual logs and outputs for them needs a customized approach. This paper presents such an approach. In addition, an HTML and JavaScript tool developed in-house is introduced. This tool automates the generation of a SAS program that almost emulates a conventional scenario of submitting a batch program in a command-line shell using SASGSUB commands.

Many organizations are using SAS^® Visual Analytics for their daily reporting. But as more users gain access to the visual tool, it is easy to lose track of what data is being used, what reports are being accessed, and what elements of the system are classified as critical. With SAS Visual Analytics comes a governance exercise that all organizations should provision for, as otherwise it jeopardizes its maintenance and performance. This paper explores the three different auditing areas that can be configured with SAS Visual Analytics and the different metrics that are associated with them. It presents how to configure the auditing, the data sources that are being populated on the background, and how to exploit them to expand your reports beyond the pre-created audit reports. Consideration is also given to the IT and infrastructure side of enabling auditing mechanisms, with data volumes and archiving practices being at the heart of the discussion.

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 that 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.

Today it is vital for an organization to manage, distribute, and secure content for its employees. In most cases, different groups of employees are interested in different content, and some content should not be available to everyone. It is the SAS^® administrator's job to design a metadata group structure that makes managing content easier. SAS enables you to create any metadata group organizational structure imaginable, and it is common to define a metadata group structure that mimics the organization's hierarchy. Circular group memberships are frequently the cause of unexpected issues with SAS web applications. A circular group relationship can be as simple as two groups being members of one another. You might not be aware that you have defined this type of recursive association between groups. The paper identifies some problems that are caused by recursive group memberships and provides tools to investigate your metadata group structure that help identify recursive metadata group relationships. We explain the process of extracting group associations from the SAS^® Metadata Server, and we show how to organize this data to investigate group relationships. We use a stored process to generate a report and SAS^® Visual Analytics to generate a network diagram that provides a graphical representation of an organization's group relationship structure, to easily identify circular group structures.

SAS^® Environment Manager is the predominant tool for managing your SAS^® environment. Its popularity is increasing quickly as evidenced by the increased technical support requests from our customers. This paper identifies the most frequently asked questions from customers by reviewing the support work completed by the development and technical support teams over the last few years. The questions range across topics such as web interface usage; alerts, controls, and resource discovery; Agent issues; and security issues. Questions discussed in the paper include: What resources need to be configured after we install SAS Environment Manager? What Control Actions are available, what is their purpose, and when do I use them? Why does SAS Environment Manager show all resources as (!) (Down)? What is the best way to enable an alert for a resource? How do I configure HTTPs? Can we configure the Agents with certificates other than the default? What is the combination of roles needed to see the Resources Tab? This paper presents detailed answers to the questions and also points out where you can find more information. We believe that by understanding these answers, SAS^® administrators will be more knowledgeable about SAS Environment Manager, and can better implement and manage their SAS environment.

Capacity management is concerned with managing, controlling, and optimizing the hardware resources on a technology platform. Its primary goal is to ensure that IT resources are right-sized to meet current and future business requirements in a cost-effective manner. In other words, keeping those hardware vendors at bay! A SAS^® LASR Analytic Server, with its dependence on in-memory resources, necessitate a revisit to the traditional IT server capacity management practices. A major UK-based financial services institution operates a multi-tenanted Enterprise SAS^® platform. The tenants share platform resources and as such, require quotas enforced with system limits and costs for their resource utilization, aligned to the business outcomes and agreed-upon service level agreements (SLAs). This paper discusses the implementation of system, operational, and development polices applicable in a multi-tenanted SAS platform, in order to optimize an investment in the analytic platform provided by SAS LASR Analytic Server and to be in control as to when capacity uplifts are required.

Developing software using agile methodologies has become the common practice in many organizations. We use the SCRUM methodology to prepare, plan, and implement changes in our analytics environment. Preparing for the deployment of a new release usually took two days of creating packages, promoting them, deploying jobs, creating migration scripts, and correcting errors made in the first attempt. A sprint that originally took 10 working days (two weeks) was effectively reduced to barely seven. By automating this process, we were able to reduce the time needed to prepare our deployment to less than half a day, increasing the time we can spend developing by 25%. In this paper, we present the process and system prerequisites for automating the deployment process. We also describe the process, code, and scripts required for automating metadata promotion and physical table comparison and update.

How many environments does your organization have-three (Dev/Test/Prod), five (Dev/SIT/UAT/Pre-Prod/Prod), or maybe only one? Once you've built your SAS^® process-an ETL job, a model, an exploration, or a report-how should you promote it across these environments? If you have only one environment, is a development life cycle still possible? (Yes, it is.) Historically, the traditional systems development life cycle (SDLC) spans multiple environments (for example, Dev/Test/Prod). This approach has benefits-primarily to ensure that change in one environment does not adversely impact others, but costs and release time-frames mean this is not always practicable. Some sites now adopt a two-platform approach: Non-Production and Production. Non-Prod exists for technology change, such as new software, hot fixes, database connections, and so on. At these sites, the business runs wholly within the Production environment, yet still requires a business-specific life-cycle management within the Production environment. And, of course, all promotion must include thorough testing. Other questions to consider are: 1) Can this promotion process be automated? 2) Can this process extend beyond business content to include configuration settings? This presentation investigates the SAS tools available to promote content between environments or between functional areas of a single environment, and how to automate and test the promotion process. Just imagine: a weekly automated and tested promotion process? Let's see

Getting speedy results from your SAS^® programs when you re working with bulky data sets is more than elegant coding techniques. There are several approaches to improving performance when working with biggish data. Although you can upgrade your hardware, this just helps you to run inefficient code and bloated tables quicker. So, you should also consider the results that tuning your database and adjusting your SAS platform can bring. In this paper, we review the various options available to give you some ideas about things you can do better.

SAS^® Management Console has been a key tool to interact with SAS^® Metadata Server. But sometimes users need much more than what SAS Management Console can do. This paper contains a couple of SAS^® macros that can be used in SAS^® Enterprise Guide^® and PC SAS to read SAS metadata. These macros read users, roles, and groups registered in metadata. This paper explains how these macros can be executed in SAS Enterprise Guide and how to change these macros to meet other business requirements. There might be some tools available in the market that can be used to read SAS metadata, but this paper helps in achieving most of them within a SAS client like PC SAS and SAS Enterprise Guide, without requiring any additional plug-ins.

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SAS^® job flows created by Windows services have a problem. Currently, they can execute only jobs in a series (one at a time). This can slow down job processing, and it limits the utility of the flows. This paper shows how you can alter the flow of Windows services after they have been generated to enable jobs to run in parallel (side by side). A high-level overview of PROC GROOVY, which automates these changes, is provided, as well as a summary of the positives and negatives of running jobs in parallel.

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The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of SAS^® metadata security for new or inexperienced SAS administrators. The focus of the discussion is on identifying the most common metadata security objects such as access control entries (ACEs), access control templates (ACTs), metadata folders, authentication domains, and so on, and on describing how these objects work together to secure the SAS environment. Based on a standard SAS^® Enterprise Office Analytics for Midsize Business installation in a Windows environment, this paper walks through a simple example of securing a metadata environment, which demonstrates how security is prioritized, the impact of each security layer, and how conflicts are resolved.

Not only does the new SAS^® Viya platform bring exciting advancements in high-performance analytics, it also takes a revolutionary step forward in the area of administration. The new SAS^® Cloud Analytic Services is accompanied by new platform management tools and techniques that are designed to ease the administrative burden while leveraging the open programming and visual interfaces that are standard among SAS Viya applications. Learn about the completely rewritten SAS^® Environment Manager 3.2, which supports the SAS Viya platform. It includes a cleaner HTML5-based user interface, more flexible and intuitive authorization windows, and user and group management that is integrated with your corporate Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). Understand how authentication works in SAS Viya without metadata identities. Discover the key differences between SAS^®9 and SAS Viya deployments, including installation and automated update-in-place strategies orchestrated by Ansible for hot fixes, maintenance, and new product versions alike. See how the new microservices and stateful servers are managed and monitored. In general, gain a better understanding of the components of the SAS Viya architecture, and how they can be collectively managed to keep your environment available, secure, and performant for the users and processes you support.

As a SAS^® administrator, have you ever wanted to look at the data in SAS^® Environment Manager spanning a longer length of time? Has your manager asked for access to the data so that they can use it to spot trends and make predictions? This paper shows you how to share that wealth of information found in the SAS Environment Manager log data. It explains how to save and store the data for use in SAS^® Visual Analytics. You will find tips on structuring the data for easy analysis and examples of using the data to make business decisions.

SAS^® environments are evolving in multiple directions. Modern web interfaces such as SAS^® Studio are replacing the traditional SAS^® Display Manager system. At the same time, distributed analytic computing, centrally managed by SAS^® Grid Manager, is becoming the standard topology for many enterprises. SAS administrators are faced with the task of providing business users properly configured, tuned, and monitored applications. The tips included in this paper provide SAS administrators with best practices to centrally manage SAS Studio options and repositories, proper grid tuning, effective monitoring of user sessions, high-availability considerations and more.

Knowing which SAS^® products are being used in your organization, by whom, and how often helps you decide whether you have the right mix and quantity licensed. These questions are not easy to answer. We present an innovative technique using three SAS utilities to answer these questions. This paper includes example code written for Linux that can easily be modified for Windows and other operating systems.

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Within a SOX-compliant environment, a batch job is run. During the process, an FTP server needs to be accessed. The batch user password is not known and the FTP credentials are not known either. How safely and securely can we achieve this? The approach is to have an authentication domain within the SAS metadata created that has the FTP credentials. Create an internal SAS user within the SAS metadata. This user exists only within the SAS metadata, so it does not pose any risk. Create an FTP server within the SAS metadata. Add and link everything together within the SAS metadata. Within the SAS batch job, the SAS internal user will be used (with the use of the hashed password) to connect to the metadata to get the FTP credentials stored within the authentication domain and retrieve or upload the data.

Your SAS^® Visual Analytics users begin to create and share reports. As an administrator, you want to track performance of the reports over time, analyzing timing metrics for key tasks such as data query and rendering, relative to total user workload for the system. Logging levels can be set for the SAS Visual Analytics reporting services that provide timing metrics for each report execution. The log files can then be mined to create a data source for a time series plot in SAS Visual Analytics. You see report performance over time with peak workloads and how this impacts the user experience. Isolation on key metrics can identify performance bottlenecks for improvement. First we look at how logging levels are modified for the reporting services and focus on tracking a single user viewing a report. Next, we extract data from a long running log file to create a report performance data source. Using SAS Visual Analytics, we analyze the data with a time series plot, looking at times of peak work load and how the user experience changes.

Over the years, the use of SAS^® has grown immensely within Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), making platform support and maintenance overly complicated and time consuming. At RBS, we realized that we have been living 'war and peace' every day for many years and that the time has come to re-think how we support SAS platforms. With our approach to rationalize and consolidate the ways our organization uses SAS came the need to review and improve the processes and procedures we have in place. This paper explains why we did it, what we've changed or reinvented, and how all these have changed our way of operation by bringing us closer to DevOps and helping us to improve our relationship with our customers as well as building trust in the service we deliver.

Whether you are a new SAS^® administrator or you are switching to a Linux environment, you have a complex mission. This job becomes even more formidable when you are working with a system like SAS^® Visual Analytics that requires multiple users loading data daily. Eventually a user has data issues or creates a disruption that causes the system to malfunction. When that happens, what do you do next? In this paper, we go through the basics of a SAS Visual Analytics Linux environment and how to troubleshoot the system when issues arise.