SAS Viya Inventory scan and reporting
SAS 9 Content Assessment is a very popular way to examine and document the content of a SAS 9.4 environment. Did you know you have similar functionality in SAS Viya? In this blog post, I will look at the inventory options in SAS Viya. In Viya 4 recent improvements have made scanning your environment and examining the configuration and content even easier. It is a recommended best practice to run a scan before and after any major changes in your Viya environment. For example, scan before and after a system migration, an update of the Viya software, before a backup, and after a restore, and before and after migrating content.
In this post, we will focus on Viya 4, but first, let us recap what is available on Viya 3.5.
SAS Viya 3.5 Inventory scan and reporting
In SAS Viya 3.5 the scanning functionality that collects the inventory data is provided by the inventory plug-in of the sas-admin
-line interface. The inventory plug-in of the CLI:
- Generates the Plan and Backup Ansible playbook
- Delivers the Viya Inventory Reports
The Plan and Backup playbook is the way you run a scan, the playbook creates and publishes all the data that supports the Viya Inventory reports. I covered this process in the first part of this YouTube video. Recent updates to the playbook have added support for scanning a Viya 3.x multi-tenant environment.
SAS Viya 4 Inventory scan and reporting
In Viya 2022.09 and later inventory scanning in Viya 4 became easier. A Cronjob the sas-viya-inventory-collector makes it simple to scan and inventory the Viya 4 environment. The Cronjob also supports the ability to compare the two most recent scans. Additionally then Cronjob provides support. for scanning deployments that are multi-tenant and/or SCIM-enabled.
The Inventory Reports are delivered when Viya is installed, there are two reports available at Products > SAS Environment Manager > Dashboard
- SAS Viya 4 Inventory: surfaces the result of the most recent inventory scan of the Viya environment.
- SAS Viya Inventory Comparison: compares the last two inventory scan results.
The reports are supported by data loaded into the SystemData CAS library by the scan process. Two tables hold the results of the most recent inventory scan.
- SASVIYAINVENTORY4
- SASVIYAINVENTORY4_CASSVRDETAILS
To enable comparison after the second scan runs each scan also keeps a copy of the prior SASVIYAINVENTORY4 table. If you have run at least two scans you should also have the table SASVIYAINVENTORY4_PRIOR.
Running a Viya 4 Inventory scan
Scan functionality is delivered by the sas-viya-inventory-collector Kubernetes Cronjob. The Cronjob, by default, is not scheduled. Instead, it is delivered as a convenient way of performing a scan. The following command runs a scan by creating and running a Kubernetes job from the Cronjob. The new job is named sas-inventory-collector-job (you can give it any name).
kubectl create job --from=cronjob/sas-inventory-collector sas-inventory-collector-job
To follow the log as the job runs execute:
kubectl logs -l job-name=sas-inventory-collector-job -f | klog
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The example scan will scan a non-multi-tenant environment. In a multi-tenant environment an inventory can be performed on a per-tenant basis by setting the tenant environment variable to the tenant name prior to running a scan.
kubectl set env cronjob/sas-inventory-collector TENANT=tenant_name
When the job is complete you can view the SAS Viya Inventory Report (more on the report later).
Running an Inventory Comparison
If you have run at least two scans you can do a comparison. The comparison scan will compare the most recent scan results to the previous scan results. To perform a comparison set the COMPARISON environment variable to true and create a job (When the job is completed it is a good practice to reset the environment variable.)
kubectl set env cronjob/sas-inventory-collector COMPARISON=true
kubectl create job --from=cronjob/sas-inventory-collector sas-inventory-comparison-job
kubectl set env cronjob/sas-inventory-collector COMPARISON-
Follow the job log:
kubectl logs -l job-name=sas-inventory-collector-comparison -f | klog
The output of the comparison scan process looks like this.
Comparison with Viya 3.5 after Migration
In a migration from Viya 3.x you can compare your new Viya 4 environment to the source Viya 3.x environment. In order to do this
- Before migration perform an inventory scan of the source environment (for details see this YouTube video.)
- Perform a full-system migration of the Viya 3.5 environment to Viya 4. The data from the scan of your Viya 3.x environment will be included in the migration.
- Perform an inventory scan of the new Viya 4 environment.
- Perform a comparison scan to compare the inventory results from step 3 to those from step 1.
To run a Viya 4 to 3 comparison, set the COMPARISON environment variable to migration and then run the job. The scan will compare the most recent Viya 4 scan results to the scan results that were migrated from Viya 3.5. When the job is completed it is a good practice to reset the environment variable.
kubectl set env cronjob/sas-inventory-collector COMPARISON=migration
kubectl create job --from=cronjob/sas-inventory-collector sas-inventory-comparison-job
kubectl logs -l job-name=sas-inventory-comparison-job -f | klog
kubectl set env cronjob/sas-inventory-collector COMPARISON-Scan Results
SAS Viya 4 Inventory Report
The SAS Viya 4 Inventory Report surfaces the inventory results. The Status tab gives a summary of the scan results. Let's look at a couple of the useful Tabs on the report.
CAS Inventory
The CAS Inventory lists the defined CAS Libraries, the types of CAS Libraries, and the number of tables and file system size of each CAS Library.
Object Inventory
The Object Inventory tab lists all the objects in the SAS Viya Environment. You can filter on Internal Objects versus Customer Created Objects. The screenshot shows a count and list of the Visual Analytics Reports in the Viya environment.
NOTE: if you have a report named "Viya Inventory Report" your system was most likely migrated from Viya 3 and that is the Viya 3 version of the report.
SAS Viya Inventory Comparison Report
The SAS Viya Inventory Comparison report compares the two most recent scans or, if you have migrated from Viya 3.x it can compare to the scan results the Viya 3.x scan results. The report flags if the:
- content is different.
- an object exists in the source deployment but not in the target deployment.
- an object exists in the target deployment but not in the source deployment.
- an object is different but only in the created or modified dates.
Wrap-Up
The inventory collector Cronjob makes it very easy to perform an inventory scan of a SAS Viya environment. The inventory reports surface the results of the scan. It is a recommended best practice to run a scan before and after any major changes in your Viya environment. For example, scan before and after migration from 3.5 or 4 to 4, an update of the Viya software, before a backup, and after a restore and before and after migrating content. The documentation for SAS Viya Inventory was recently updated and moved to the Tools area of the Viya Administration Guide.
Additional Information
SAS Viya Inventory Documentation
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