Production Environment Documentation

[sudipta_goswami]

Hi Gurus,

I am entirely new to SAS product suite. I will be mostly working on Administration point. Our Production environment user SAS 9.4. I am not sure about the hotfixes.

Can you please guide me on how to start off on this. At the begining I would like to start of with documenting the current environment features and installed product. Can you share some template which can be used for it. This document will be more of a run book which will contain all the information at granular level like Home Directories, logging information etc. Kindly share some templates for capturing this data.

In addition to this, I would request to share some methodology to begin of with the Admin duties.

Regards,

Sudipta.

[ghiglie]

Hello Sudipta,

 what you are asking is quite like the Platform Administrator course... 

You should start looking for Administration Guides. You can find infos about your installation in the Documents folder, placed in you "SAS configuration dir"/Lev1.

[sudipta_goswami]

Thanks for your advice. I will surely go through this.

In addition to above, I was looking to create some documentation of the environment I will be working. Is there any standard template which I can use. It will be more of a run book for my environment, so that any one who goes through it will get a real feel of how my environment is.

Pls advice on this too.

Regards,

Sudipta.

[SASKiwi]

I suggest you check to see if there is any design documentation for your SAS environment. Normally when server-based SAS is installed detailed design documents are produced so the installers have a guide for configuring SAS. These would be a really good starting point for your production documentation as there is really no such thing as a "standard" SAS installation. 

[sudipta_goswami]

Thanks for your response. 

As I am new to the environment and have access to the servers, is there any specific location from where I can extract this informations. 

I figured out the current Deployment Architecture as :

a. 2 Metadata nodes.

b. 4 Compute nodes.

c. 1 Grid Master Node.

d. 1 Mid Tier node.

Is there any specific location from where I can extract the deployment informations? It will be really helpful to get this information.

Thanks & Regards,

Sudipta.

[Nee_aggarwal]

Hello,

My suggestion, first you need to enroll yourself in the hotfix notificaiton. Below is the web site:

http://support.sas.com/techsup/news/tsnews.html

I will recommend to go through the following website as well:

ftp://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/hotfix/faq.html

Most important, it is not recommended to install each and every available hotfix.  You should review your business requirements and find out if there is any burning issue which you can resolve through any hotfix. 

As such I am not aware about any generic template but let me know if you come across any.

Thanks.

Regards,

Neeraj

[sudipta_goswami]

Thanks Neeraj.

[JuanS_OCS]

Hi,

I have a question: was your environment installed by a SAS Consultant or SAS Partner? I would expect it since you have Grid. And if so, the consultant probably delivered already good documentation to your company (minimum, a document named Install Report). I would suggest you to contact this consultant or find the documentation by yoyrself.

Also, for Administration tasks in SAS: https://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/Platform...

To see your current installed components, you need to run the View Registry tool on each machine: http://support.sas.com/kb/35/968.html

This tool is also basic in order to get the hotfixes. 

The hotfixes process is not very complex, but if you are new in SAS, I would strongly recommend you to have the support from a SAS Consultant during your first hotfixes processes, so you can experience, document and understand the orocess. Again, specially because you have a grid environment and you are new in SAS. You will also feel more comfortable on that way.

[sudipta_goswami]

Thanks Juan for your response. 

I shall check if I can get any documentation is in place or not. In addition can you tell me the default locations at server level from where I can extract all this informations. I believe during installation some html files gets created which cotains all such information.

Just curious to know about this.

Regards,

Sudipta.

[JuanS_OCS · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Most of the configurable info you can find under config/LevX/utilities/configuration.properties. on each machine, which is quite unreadable but it contains the info 🙂

Of course, this file won't include any configuration applied manually after the Deployment.

[sudipta_goswami]

Thanks a ton Juan. I will dig on this further. With this my doubts are clarified. And this open question can be marked as closed.

Is there any way I can reach out to you Juan.

Regards,

Sudipta.

[JuanS_OCS]

Hi Sudipta,

You are welcome! It is great to receive such a nice feedback, always. Thank you 🙂

You can always contact me (and a lot of really knowledgeable people) here on the communities, or you can drop me a private message if needed.

Kind regards,

Juan