topic Re: SAS data set usage report in Administration and Deployment

SAS data set usage report

Overlord — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 15:30:49 GMT

Due to a wide modernization effort of our systems I need to find out the usage of all SAS data sets through SAS EG (we have a SAS grid and the operating system on which all this is running is Microsoft Windows Server). Ideally the report would contain the following columns: SAS data set name, Date-Time of access, User identifier who accessed the data set. I think this might be something that could be obtained using the SAS Management Console, but I did not find this capability in the documentation on-line or through searches on-line. I would prefer of course to explore the SAS Management Console myself but I can't since I'm not the SAS administrator at my company. This is something that we were able to obtain when our SAS data sets were residing on our IBM mainframe, but this information was obtained from OS/390 (an "add-on" to the mainframe's operating system) if my memory serves me well, i.e. not a SAS functionality.

Does anyone knows if this type of reporting is possible? If so, how exactly?

Re: SAS data set usage report

MargaretC — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 16:15:38 GMT

I talk about how to do this in this SAS Global Forum paper: https://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings17/SAS0565-2017.pdf

Re: SAS data set usage report

Overlord — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 18:33:57 GMT

I finally found a glimmer of hope after reviewing a lot of the dub-linked documentation.

After reviewing this documentation I deducted (not guaranteed as I have not used these tools) that we need to have the SAS Environment Manager software available to access the required reports, or to be able to build the necessary reports. This software is useless if the SAS Environment Manager Extended Monitoring has not first been initialized so that the SAS Environment Manager Data Mart gets populated with production statistics. This means that if this is not already running then we will only start collecting meaningful statistics on SAS data set usage once it is initialized. Not sure yet if I will get the information I need. Before I get satisfaction on this I will have a couple of meetings on the subject... I will then update this post to give more specific information and to confirm/infirm this solution.

Thanks for taking the time to provide this answer, before getting this I had found nothing with web searches.