Mental note to self, if you want to add a new deployment directory to deploy jobs too, for the scheduler then:
Within SAS Management Console right click on the Schedule Manager folder/tree and the select create new deployment directory.
Details are on page 142 of this, http://support.sas.com/documentation/onlinedoc/91pdf/sasdoc_913/mgmtconsole_ug_9952.pdf
We are currently trying to monitor some SAS queries against our new Star Schemas to see if we can make them go faster.
So I have been doing a bit of research to see whats out there to help us do the monitoring.
In my search I stumbled across this article:
Monitoring SAS® through the Web
ABSTRACT
Monitoring SAS processes and SAS work space in a mutli-user environment, such as UNIX, is key in maintaining optimal performance. This paper will present the SAS Monitor, a tool which captures SAS resources and uses SAS to analyze and display this information via a Web browser. SAS Monitor is useful for SAS/UNIX administrators and informative for end users since the information can be widely distributed through an intranet. Even though SAS Monitor has been tested on Solaris, it can be adapted to other flavors of UNIX. This paper will explore and explain some of the techniques used in capturing and publishing SAS resources on the web.They also provide example code for this at SAS Monitor – Source Code
Unfortunately the code is based upon Unix and we are running windows. So the search continues….
As an aside we are still building the Star Schema’s using SAS Datasets but we plan to test SAS SPDS vs Oracle as a repository for the Star Schemas at the end of the year to see which performs better. If one results in any noticable improvement we may move to it, as it will also solve any file locking issues we currently encounter with SAS Datasets. More on that later.
The 1.4 version of the BI Manager in the SAS Management Console has some pretty cool functionality around moving Web Report Studio reports and their underlying Information Maps across BIP Tree folders.
This is particularly useful if you don’t have a separate development/test environment and are using separate BIP Tree folders for managing the development of reports by moving them across the folders (ie. Development Reports, Test Reports, Production Reports).
However if you still have BI Manager 1.3 installed the option to move the dependent information maps with the reports doesn’t exist.
The hot fix that you need to install on the SMC client to upgrade the BI Manager to 1.4 is on the SAS site here:
http://www.sas.com/apps/demosdownloads/foundationsvcs_PROD_1.1_sysdep.jsp
Trick for young players in that it is not on the SAS Support site under the usual hotfix area.
Hopefully this will save you the hour or two we spent tracking down what we needed to do to upgrade.
Of course you could just manually export the files, hack the XML and re-import them like Barry did 
Within the SAS Management Console there is a plugin called ‘Configuration Troubleshooter’ whihc has always been blank for me. I thought it was a bit like the ‘Roadmap’ capability in SAS Management Console, i.e a place holder for something that hadn’t been implemented yet (or just never got developed as expected).
But with a hat tip to Barry Stevens at Housing New Zealand, it is a extremely powerful tool and even easier to setup.
So what is the Configuration troubleshooter? Well according to an excellent paper from SAS called
it is:
“The Configuration Troubleshooter is a plug-in for SAS® Management Console that is used to query and display the configuration of a SAS Business Intelligence environment. The Configuration Troubleshooter gathers configuration data from three main sources: the SAS® Metadata Repository; Web servers and Web application servers; and configuration files, and displays the data in a window for review and interpretation.”
For me it is a great tool that enables you to investigate what you have got setup, how and where. It also enables you to create your own rules to document and monitor areasthat aren;t in the standard Configuration Triubleshooter setup.
Checkout the SAS paper and have a go.
When SAS decided that they needed to provide enterprise scheduling capability they partnered with Platform Computing and bundled an OEM version of their LSF product into some of the suites, such as Data Integration Server and Business Intelligence Server (although I believe they are no longer bundled and have to be purchased separately).
Platform LSF provides the relatively unique capability of being able to schedule jobs across Mainframe, Unix and Windows servers (Oracle and Microsoft users will ask why this is needed, but remember SAS has been around for 25+ years, so there is still SAS on mainframes at most large SAS sites)
On the Platform website the marketing team have compiled a very descriptive description:
“Process Manager for SAS is comprehensive job scheduling software that automates the scheduling and execution of SAS jobs. It offers the sophistication of resource virtualization, optimal resource sharing, enterprise scalability and seamless manageability across the entire enterprise. SAS Grid-enabled Products -SAS Enterprise ETL Server -SAS Enterprise Miner -SAS Risk Dimensions”
The nice thing is SAS integrated LSF to talk to the Metadata Server, providing a reasonable level of automation.
Anyway there was an interesting paper called SAS® Scheduling: Getting the Most Out of Your Time and Resources at SUGI 30 in 2005, that outlines what LSF is, how to use it with SAS and even has some code examples.
If you ever need to change the passord for one of the SAS Administrator id’s (i.e. sasadm, sastrust, saswbadm, sassrv, sasdemo etc) then you will find that it is not a simple case of updating the hosts password and metadata passwords.
There are a few more places that you will need to edit.
SAS Tech Support have a document that explains what you need to do – TS736 – Changing Password for Default Users
The doc is orientated towards a solutions based install, but you will need to follow most of the steps, depending on what products you have installed (i.e. Business Intelligence Server, Data Integration Server etc)
As you will see lots of text edits required, but I wont rant about why this shouldn’t be so difficult, here’s hoping SAS 9.2 makes it a little easier…..
When you install SAS 9 Business Intelligence server, Data Integration Server, Analytical Server or a SAS Solution, you will find that there are now a myriad of log files produced that you should (yes you really should) monitor and archive.
Install multiple of the SAS components on multiple physical servers and log trolling is even more fun.
So I have started to document the location and uses of these logs at : A list of SAS 9 Log locations and uses
Its probably going to take a while to populate all the details, so if you know of something that already exists, let me know.
When you do a new SAS 9 install, there are a number of distinct user id’s that have to be created, which map to specific roles within the SAS 9 environment. While you can change the default usernames, it is recommended that you create and use these distinct user id’s rather than using a single (or combined) id.
The required user id’s are:
sasadm – The SAS Administrator user id should be created on your metadata server machine. This user has privileges to manage user accounts in metadata and administer the metadata server. The SAS Administrator has unrestricted access to the metadata and this user ID should be protected accordingly. This ID should only be used for the SAS Management Console application.
sassrv- The SAS General Server user id should be created on your server machines. You must make the SAS security group its default group. This account will be used by the object spawner to launch stored process servers. This account will need access to any OS resources required to run stored processes. The default configuration of the SAS 9.1 Intelligence Architecture creates this single account for load balanced, stored process server usage. Additional server accounts can be created to give different levels of access as required.
sasguest- The SAS Guest user id will need to be created on your metadata server machine. This user is a generic user account and should have the lowest level of security privileges. This user id is used by the SAS® Information Delivery Portal to log users into the public kiosk area.
sastrust- The SAS Trusted User will be created on the metadata server machine. Because this user ID is a trusted ID, SAS servers such as the OLAP server and mid-tier applications can use this ID to impersonate authenticated clients on the metadata server; that is, the servers can communicate with the metadata server on behalf of the clients. This is a highly privileged account and should be protected accordingly.
sasdemo- The SAS Demo User will be created on your metadata server machine. This user has permission to demonstrate the SAS software you have installed and to verify the configuration.
saswbadm- The SAS Web Administrator will be created on your metadata server machine. You need only create an account for the Web administrator if you will be installing web applications, such as SAS® Web Report Studio, SAS® Web Report Viewer, or SAS Information Delivery Portal. This user has permission to administer the SAS Web infrastructure.
This information was sourced from Sugi 29 – Paper 225-29
Top Deployment Considerations for the SAS® 9.1 Intelligence Architecture
Which also provides a great overview of how the whole SAS 9 environment hangs together, check it out.
Every now and again SAS issues a whitepaper with recommended best practice for administering your SAS9 environment. There is a great whitepaper over at SAS Support titled:
It outlines the best practice for backing up your SAS9 environment and covers the areas:
It doesn’t include:
As well as outlining the SAS tools available to backup up your environment it also provides a good overview of how all the technical components fit together and recommended back approaches.
If you ever want to know what is licensed on a SAS server you can run this little bit of code:
proc setinit;
run;
If you run it via a base SAS session. on the machine itself, it will display a list of licensed SAS product and their expiry dates in the log window.
If you are running this in SAS Enterprise Guide and don’t have show log automatically turned on, then you will need to view the log once the job has completed to see the details.
If you are running multiple SAS Servers and running this via SAS Enterprise Guide then you will need change the workspace server to point to each server before you run it, to see what is licensed on each server:
And of course if your metadata server is on a separate server to your workspace servers then you can’t use SAS Enterprise Guide at all, so you will need to run it via a base SAS session on the machine itself.
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