topic Re: Production support in SAS Programming

Production support

justusjillella — Sat, 23 Mar 2019 23:00:26 GMT

Can someone share what is the day to day routine of a production support guy from their experience?

Re: Production support

Kurt_Bremser — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 07:15:11 GMT

check my office mailbox for notifications for crashed SAS jobs from the scheduler
read the early morning report mail I have my server send me
log on to the server with relevant user ID's (superuser, SAS install user, batch job user) and check the internal server mails for them (in case a cron job produced unexpected output or similar)
use the relevant services (workspace server from EG, SAS Studio, stored process) to check if everything's fine from the client side.
check the ticketing system for something to do
browse SAS communities, wait for phone calls from users

Re: Production support

justusjillella — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 10:06:35 GMT

Thank you

Re: Production support

Reeza — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 23:17:32 GMT

A lot of this depends on how the infrastructure is set up. I just started a new role and they have nothing, so our production team is not so much support at this moment and more developer. Once the data warehouse build is complete, she can transition back to being a mainly support. If you're wondering why we didn't split the roles and hire someone new for development, it's because she's very familiar with the data, how it's captured and used, and getting someone else up to speed will take longer overall. There's a chance she ends up being the developer full time and we hire a new support person. But time will tell.

But main idea, it really really varies from org to org and the organizations tech maturity level.

Re: Production support

justusjillella — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 23:32:22 GMT

HI Reeza,
Can you share some of the many reasons why a tested application in dev fails in the production environment from your experience

Re: Production support

Reeza — Sun, 24 Mar 2019 23:37:45 GMT

1. Test data isn't robust enough and edge cases are missed.
2. Prod and Dev are not exactly the same set up, though you think they are.

Re: Production support

Patrick — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:35:14 GMT

....and to add to @Reeza some more possibilities:

3. Missed test cases

4. Faulty code migration (Prod code base not exactly what has been tested)