topic Re: Audit VA actions... without enabling auditing in SAS Visual Analytics

Audit VA actions... without enabling auditing

giupa — Tue, 11 Sep 2018 17:54:32 GMT

Hi all,

we need to collect VA actions in order to have the detail of every report open by a single user and we don't want to enable auditing.

Is it possible to recover these informations from some log, properly set? Thanks a lot

Re: Audit VA actions... without enabling auditing

AndrewHowell — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 00:03:11 GMT

You want to audit without enabling auditing.. hmm..

What auditing do you NOT want to enable? Why not?

Do (or can) you enable extended monitoring? If so, you should be able to use the track who has accessed which reports.

Check out the Environment Manager's User Guide - if there's not an out-of-the-box report, you should be able to easily clone a report and customise it to your needs.

Re: Audit VA actions... without enabling auditing

JuanS_OCS — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 07:40:29 GMT

Hello @giupa,

I agree with @AndrewHowell and I would like to know as well:

- why not enable auditing for VA?

- what actions would you like to audit, exactly

The fact is, if you want to capture the Audit from VA, you can do it manually as well ( I did it before VA Audit was out ), but it is really not worth. You will basically do the same as the enable VA Auditing, but spending way more time (exponentially), error prone, and still, you might miss some important information that you would get only by contacting some specific team member of the SAS Technical Support team.

And that, without speaking about all the maintenance costs of a custom application (logs, code to parse, reports, etc) you developed.

I think the trouble is not worth at all. To enable the VA Auditing is the way to go, unless a very specific reason behind.

Re: Audit VA actions... without enabling auditing

giupa — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 07:56:31 GMT

Hi,
thanks for your answers.

We don't want to enable auditing for VA cause we already have same
performance issue, and, if it's possible, we don't need to add overhead.

We would like to audit every reports viewed by a user in Visual Analytics
Viewer.

Re: Audit VA actions... without enabling auditing

JuanS_OCS — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 09:44:24 GMT

Hi @giupa,

when VA Audit is enabled, it is true that it could degrade performance, if it is not maintained properly. But it should not create any performance overhead if maintained OK.

About your question: you could extend the logging information for the VisualAnalyticsReportViewer web application.

SAS 9.4 Logging: https://documentation.sas.com/api/docsets/logug/9.4/content/logug.pdf?locale=en

Usage Note 55426: Locating the log files for the SAS® 9.4 middle tier : http://support.sas.com/kb/55/426.html

SAS-configuration-directory/Levn/Web/Common/LogConfig/SASVisualAnalyticsViewer-log4j.xml

You will need to restart this web application to make it take effect and see the new info in the log.

Re: Audit VA actions... without enabling auditing

giupa — Wed, 12 Sep 2018 09:58:31 GMT

Hi JuanS_OCS .
thanks a lot.
We try to extend the logging information for
the VisualAnalyticsReportViewer including the informations we need.

Re: Audit VA actions... without enabling auditing

AndrewHowell — Thu, 13 Sep 2018 01:40:53 GMT

"We don't want to enable auditing for VA cause we already have same performance issue, and, if it's possible, we don't need to add overhead."

So how do you intend to audit what you are doing in order to know what needs to change - including auditing again to verify improvement - without turning on auditing?

You have an issue - ok, accept that your issue affects performance, but also accept that in order to rectify the issue means (temporarily) turning on auditing to gather appropriate metrics to address the underlying root cause.

Re: Audit VA actions... without enabling auditing

SASKiwi — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 05:09:18 GMT

If you have an existing performance issue investigate it and fix it - SAS Tech Support are very helpful with resolving these types of problems. I would regard this as more important than enabling auditing.

Once performance is good there should be little impact with enabling auditing and no reason to shortcut it.