Working with SAS Environment Manager Extended Monitoring

Understanding the SAS Environment Manager Setup Components

Purpose and Components

Extended monitoring implements best practices for SAS Environment Manager and also provides the framework needed for SAS Environment Manager Service Architecture. Extended monitoring provides these two separate categories of components:

SAS Environment Manager setup

creates a predefined set of alerts, resource groups, and best-practice metric configurations. This step quickly optimizes your SAS Environment Manager configuration and implements best practices in how your environment is monitored

Data mart infrastructure

provides empty data tables, stored processes, and reports that are populated by data that is provided by the APM or ACM ETL processes

Extended monitoring components are not active until you initialize the service architecture.

Understanding the SAS Environment Manager Setup Components

Even if you are not using the extended monitoring and reporting capabilities of SAS Environment Manager Service Architecture, extended monitoring provides key components for your resource monitoring strategy. The SAS Environment Manager setup components configure extended monitoring to provide best practices in resource monitoring and alerting. These configurations and definitions enable you to begin using SAS Environment Manager right away, without having to perform manual configuration and definition processes. Extended monitoring includes these components:

resource configuration

You must configure resources such as platforms and servers that are added to your SAS Environment Manager inventory during installation so that they can begin collecting metric data. Initializing extended monitoring automates the process of configuring these resources, enabling you to start monitoring resources without having to go through a manual configuration process.

tuned alerts

Extended monitoring provides a set of optimized alerts, developed by SAS. These alerts notify you of operational issues that might be encountered in a SAS environment (such as storage issues, server status, and hardware issues). See Service Architecture Alert Definitions for a list of the alerts created by Service Architecture extended monitoring.

defined resource groups

Resources that form a logical group (such as all platforms, servers, and services in the SAS App Tier) are automatically collected into predefined groups that are defined in extended monitoring. These groups are automatically updated as you add and delete resources, so they always stay current. A resource group for every reporting table in the data mart is automatically created and maintained.

event importing and exporting

You can export events that are generated by SAS Environment Manager to support third-party monitoring applications. In addition, you can import events from other SAS applications and from third-party applications into SAS Environment Manager for processing.

HTTP checks of web applications

Enabling extended monitoring defines a set of resources that monitor the availability and responsiveness of key SAS web applications such as SAS Stored Process Web Application.

adjustments to monitoring metrics

As part of the process of optimizing resource monitoring, some adjustments are made in the metrics collected for system resources. Collection is started for some metrics, and graphing intervals are changed for others in order to make them easier to follow.

Data Mart Infrastructure

If you are using the Service Architecture, extended monitoring provides the framework and key components that enable the ETL packages to operate. Extended monitoring provides these infrastructure components:

SAS Environment Manager Data Mart

Extended monitoring creates the tables that comprise the data mart. However, extended monitoring does not provide a mechanism for loading data into the tables. Data is loaded into the tables by the ACM or APM ETL processes.

Report Center processes and reports

Much like with the data mart, extended monitoring creates the stored processes that produce the reports in the Report Center. However, these processes and reports remain unusable until one or more of the ETL processes is enabled and loads data into the data mart.