QAS Roles - Administator vs Internal Administrator

[saraimi]

Can someone point me to a resource that lays out the difference between "Quality Analytic Suite: Administrator" and "Quality Analytic Suite: Internal Administrator" roles?  I believe the latter controls whether you can use the Admin tab and have the Refresh Cache button available in the System Tray, but I don't have any documentation that clearly says so.  I'm also unsure if you must have no more than one of the two, or if they can co-exist. 

I've tried the System Administration Guide for 9.4, and our System Admin Supplement, but neither lays out the capabilities of the two roles nor contrasts them.  A search here didn't turn up anything useful for my purposes, either.  Where should I be going to learn this???

Our system is SAS Field Quality Analysis v6.2 M1, on SAS 9.4 TM5 running on Linux.

Thanks!

Steve

[Anand_V]

Hi @saraimi 

Intresting Q. I haven't used SAS Field Quality Analysis solution as such, however looking at the Admin guide most of the products are quite familiar. Usually in generic sense, In SAS anything which is internal user or role is appended by @saspw and would only confine it's usage to Metadata server Where as external admin user is an identity that is stored in metadata and would be authenticated to your ID provider (OS, AD)

As per the admin guide, FQA: Internal Admin role is used only during installation and is asked to be removed after that. So I think you should be using "Quality Analytic Suite: Administrator" for your daily admin operations.

Remove Internal Administrator Role
The Field Quality Analytics: Internal Administrator role must be deleted from
metadata by using SAS Management Console after installation and configuration is
completed. This role enables an internal administrator to set up and configure SAS Field
Quality Analytics 6.1 initially at a site. Once all setup work is complete, this role should
be deleted using SAS Management Console to help prevent a regular administrator from
accidentally modifying the configuration of SAS Field Quality Analytics in an
undesirable way.

Hope this helps!

[saraimi]

Thanks for the help, Anand!



Wow - that's in black and white, but it's a complete contradiction of our Knowledge Transfer recommendations. I keep Internal Admin as suggested to have access to the Administration tab of the application - so I can adjust analysis and reporting defaults, email addresses to which ETL notices should be sent, refresh the application cache to have it recognize user changes in SMC, etc. Removing the Internal Admin permission has never been mentioned, even in a passing "well, mostly it's supposed to be shut, but.." way.



However, you reminded me to review the emails history for this topic, and I found that I've gotten mixed advice from Tech Support (all concerning my own ID - I was not able to do



08/19/19 - Keep Internal Administrator role and leave out Administrator role to enable the Administration tab in the Quality Analysis Suite (QAS is the heart of the FQA solution) application.

10/10/19 - Keep Internal Administrator role and drop the QAS: Analyst role. The latter has fewer rights than the Internal Administrator role, so it prevents those other rights from being enabled.



I'd like to see Admin vs Internal Admin laid out in a head-to-head comparison, but my post has a second purpose. I also am trying to learn what documentation to look at to learn these things myself. I have our Administration Guide Supplement, spelling out details of our implementation here, but didn't get the Admin Guide itself. I've found a link to BI Admin Guide here, but I've had a hard time finding this and other answers within. If there's an FQA-specific one, I haven't found or been directed to it.

[saraimi · Accepted solution]

Ah - I found a highly relevant note in my scribbles from the Knowledge Transfer session:

Admin rights can use most of Admin workspace, Internal Admin can do other (dangerous) tasks

My preliminary test just now confirmed that I can use the Admin INSTEAD of Internal Admin role to do the work. 

Again, thanks Anand!