Documentation Resources for SAS Viya (2020.1 and Later)

[SimonMcGrother]

The new SAS Viya, beginning with SAS Viya 2020.1 in November of 2020, represents an exciting new era for SAS. I wanted to give you a quick overview and summary of the administration, deployment, and operations documentation available to you.

Broadly speaking, there are two sets of documentation you need to be aware of if you want to manage SAS Viya:

• The SAS Viya Operations Help Center covers all that you need to deploy, migrate, update, and operate your SAS Viya environment. The intended audience is the Kubernetes administrator.
• The SAS Viya Administration Help Center covers everything else: security, scheduling, logging, monitoring, and the admin tools (SAS Environment Manager and the SAS Viya command-line interface).  Importantly, it also covers promotion, which is the process of moving SAS 9.4 content to SAS Viya.  The intended audience for this content is the SAS administrator.

How does your role impact which documentation is best for you?

• If you are both the Kubernetes admin and the SAS admin, you’ll need all the content. The rule of thumb is: if you need any kind of Kubernetes privileges to perform a task (e.g., to issue a kubectl command), those instructions are in the SAS Viya Operations Help Center.
• If you are solely the Kubernetes admin and don’t know much about SAS, the SAS Viya Operations Help Center is your friend. We’ve intentionally tried to keep the SAS jargon to a minimum and write with you in mind. Your SAS admin can help you understand the context of some of the tasks. You’ll find your SAS admin to be helpful and knowledgeable – reach out to them.
• If you have only SAS admin duties, you will find that some familiar administrative tasks now require elevated Kubernetes permissions. Get to know your Kubernetes admin. You are going to need their help from time to time—chocolates are rarely a bad idea.

SAS will be releasing monthly updates. As such it is imperative that you know which version of the documentation you are looking at. The version selector, shown below, is an easy way to jump between versions and confirm that you are reading the right content. 

Hopefully, as the admin, you’ll know which version you have installed or are in the process of installing.  

I hope this brief primer helps you get oriented. We are really looking forward to sharing the new SAS Viya with you. 

[JuanS_OCS]

Wonderful compilation Simonm, @SimonMcGrother really useful as not everyone is aware of these documentation sites. Thank you!

Aside from this, do you know if are there going to be specifics per Cloud environment? Is there a page on any of these two sites with information about the GIT repositories for Azure?

[SimonMcGrother]

Hi @JuanS_OCS  - thank you.
We are working on content for support for the other Cloud Providers. This will start to roll out in the coming months. The documentation plan is to maintain the two documents I listed above, which would contain parallel content for the different cloud providers. 
In general, the Operations differences are mostly around system requirements and pre-installation steps. The actual deployment is going to be basically platform-agnostic.
On the admin side, the differences are mostly around support for third-party tools.
So our hope is that we can support them all in these two documents, without bloating the content too much.

I'm not totally clear on what you meant by "Is there a page on any of these two sites with information about the GIT repositories for Azure?"
We do have some SAS-generated resources available on Github. We link to those from the operations guide, but we rely on the Github readme.md files to provide descriptions of those resources. Let me know if I'm not answering your question. 

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[shoin]

More basic question, where do I go to look at the roles that come out of the box and what access is given out of the box?  Example would be visual analytics which role one needs to be (authenticated user)?  A complete list if you will please.  (I know i should go check out all links to search but ... laziness reigns supreme w' apology) 🙂

Thank you in advance,

S

[gwootton]

This documentation lists the URIs and the ones that are not initially granted to authenticated users say who they are granted to instead:

https://go.documentation.sas.com/doc/en/calcdc/3.5/calatf/n0o6xx292jn2jmn1pnj3s3oqcebw.htm