SAS Logging Facility

The SAS logging facility is a flexible and configurable framework that you can use to collect, categorize, and filter events, and write them to a variety of output devices. The logging facility supports problem diagnosis and resolution, performance and capacity management, and auditing and regulatory compliance.

To use the SAS logging facility, you can define a logging configuration file, which configures appenders and loggers. You can use the SAS logging facility in SAS programs. (For information, see ARM Logging Using the SAS Language .) SAS provides sample SAS logging facility configuration files in the SAS Help and Documentation. To access the sample configuration files, do the following:

From the SAS main window, select HelpSAS Help and Documentation.
From SAS Help and Documentation, expand Learning to Use SASBase SAS.
Select Samples, and scroll to the SAS logging facility configuration file examples.

The SAS logging facility provides flexibility for processing transactions, and enables you to customize the formatting of messages that can be written to logs.

The ARM appender processes all ARM messages submitted by an external ARM agent or by SAS ARM processing. ARM messages are formatted based on various diagnostic contexts. To log ARM messages using a configuration file, you configure an ARMAppender, a FileAppender, and a logger. The ARMAppender definition specifies ARM appender parameters. The FileAppender definition contains the log file location and the message pattern layout. The logger specifies the PERF (performance) message category. You can also configure appenders and loggers in SAS programs.

For ARM appender information, see ARM Appender Overview. For logger information, see ARM Logger Overview.

In the programming environment, if the SAS logging facility is initialized for SAS server logging, messages are written to SAS logging facility locations. If the SAS logging facility is not initialized for SAS server logging, messages are written only to SAS logging facility locations that are created in a SAS program and written to the SAS log.