Server logs

[ANON4]

Hello.  I am new to the administration side of SAS but I have been developing reports for quite a while.  I've been monitoring the disk space used on the SAS server and I noticed that the disk usage has been steadily increasing, unexpectedly, since May 2019.  I first looked at orphaned work files but those don't seem to be an issue since I started running cleanwork.exe on a daily basis in May of 2019.  Next, I looked at my metadata server logs and I believe that may be where my problem lies.  I have some very old logs dating back to 1/1/2018.  Another thing I noticed about the daily logs is that their size had been steadily increasing from 1/1/2018 (1.3 MB) to 5/1/2019 (50MB) and then the size of the daily log jumped dramatically overnight from approximately 50MB to 225+ MB in May of 2019.  The 225MB level has been maintained ever since.  Also since May 2019, it looks like there are more instances of multiple logs per day (one large and the others smaller).

1. Is there any reason that I cannot or should not delete old server logs?  If not, are there any rules-of-thumb about how many days of logs that I should keep?
2. Two things happened in May that I know about.  1) I started running cleanwork.exe nightly. 2) I started running a script in EG, hourly, that creates/updates multiple datasets and then autoloads them into memory.  Could either of these things be causing the large jump in server log size?
3. Are there any other daily logs that I could/should delete after a period of time?

Thanks for your time.

[r_behata]

The increase in the size of the daily logs could be due to enabling of additional logging for debugging , if this is not turned off due to some reason the size of the logs will be significantly higher. You can follow the link below for more details about ARM logging in SAS.

https://documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=bisag&docsetTarget=p02ybml1gyskc6n1jmk88w7se9o8.htm&docsetVe...

Archival of the metadata logs might have been defined by the policies within your organization. Please check with your system admin.

[ANON4]

Hello and thanks for the response.  No changes have been made to the logging configuration.  As far as deleting the metadata logs, I was asking if there was any problem with deleting the logs from a SAS operation/technical standpoint; we have no policy on when/if to delete metadata logs.  In other words, does SAS need to reference old logs for any reason or are they only useful to the SAS admin and, therefore, safe to delete?

[SASKiwi]

In my view old server logs are not especially useful unless you are tracking server performance over a long period of time. I'd suggest archiving and/or deleting anything older than 3 to 6 months 

[AnandVyas]

Hi @ANON4,

My answers to your questions:

1) SAS Logs is your number one place to look out for in-case of any issues or troubleshooting.
Removing them or deleting them can make you loose on those information. Instead having an archiving policy for all your SAS Tier logs would be an ideal solution.
Every organization depending upon their policy has different time window for storing/archiving of logs. It could be anything starting from 30 days to even six months.
I would suggest you to follow standard policy for archiving. You can create a simple bash script to help you with this process.
Link for sample script here: https://tekkiehead.com/linux-shell-script-to-archive-log-files.html/

2) (i) I don't think running cleanwork utility will increase your log file size.
(ii) Does your code do any Metadata related operations like Create/Update/Delete/Auth etc.? Any update done to Metadata is logged depending upon the logging you have enabled for Metadata server.
If you think after running your hourly EG Script, logs for Metadata has increased, you can review the logs for any updates based on your codes.
Here is the link to check for detailed logging enabled in metadata or not. https://documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=bisag&docsetTarget=p0hchigzq8wvtrn1tnllswe7jmqb.htm&docsetVe...

3) As suggested in Point#1 better to have archiving policy instead of deleting the logs daily.

Hope this helps!
Thanks!