Setting up email alerts for SAS admins

[Alok_Pal]

Hi there,

Our environment is fairly new and not very stable, so I want to set up email alerts for our admin team to notify them of any failure with sas servers and services. Did some googling about how to set it up but didn't found much help.

Could anyone please point me to some documentation and/or posts regarding setting up email alerts?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

[jklaverstijn]

You would have to tell us a bit more about your environment. The answer may be very different for Windows than for Linux or z/OS.

In any case you may have the SAS Environment Manager licensed. If so that's your go-to platform for SAS specific alerts. They can be as general as "server unavailable" to more specific as "object spawner unavailable". In my current contract this is what we do; we have a rather extensive Linux grid/sasva environment but for smaller shops it's basically just the same. We send email alerts but use scripting to hook into Mattermost (a Slack alternative) for push messages.

We are also looking into Ansible for so-called desired state checking that can alert for any unwanted situation.

But the proper SAS answer is of course Environment manager. Have a look at SAS Environment Manager 2.5: User's Guide, Third Edition

Hope this helps,

- Jan

[Alok_Pal]

Hi @jklaverstijn,

Thanks for your quick response. We are on Linux platform. And yes we do have SAS Environment Manager installed.
Does these alerts are only limited to Environment Manager or they can also be sent out as an email to entire team? Also, is there's any specific section/chapter in admin guide that I can focus more for email alerts?

Thank you.

[jklaverstijn · Accepted solution]

Alerts are very versatile. You can send email (to any number of of addresses), run a script (that receives a set of related values in environment variables) and execute an action like restarting a stopped service. Alerts can be associated to anything that has metrics. So server or service availability (metadata server, object spawner, web app server), but also CPU load, memory, disk space etc. Both SAS and non-SAS components of your environment are being monitored.

Slight warning for the less-than-intuitive interface of EVM. Let's say it's an acquired taste. But is is very effective and does the job well. Also it improves with every version bump. And mind you it isn't easy to do the same as a DIY project.

The chapter on alerts and events is here.

Regards,

- Jan.

[JuanS_OCS]

Hello @Alok_Pal,

@jklaverstijn gave you really good insights regarding the SAS Environment Manager. Please let me give you also mine:

I am very fond of the Environment Manager. I use it every day (and I set it up on every customer's environment I am responsible of), I think it is a great tool to give you historical insight on what's going on with your environment, and the capabilities to add even more, with the SAS Architecture Framework (aka EMI or Extended Monitoring). You can find all of that on the documentation page.

Please beware, I would never use the SAS EVM as the main monitoring system,.

Instead, I would rather use a generic Enterprise Monitoring system, such as Nagios or Zabbix if you work on Linux.

The reason for it is that the SAS EVM has a dependency on its service with the SAS Middle tier services and the SAS Metadata server. Which, in short means that if one of those services do not work properly, SAS EVM won't either, it will be down.

There are options to disable those dependencies if you contact SAS Technical Support, although not really recommended because it is not worth the lose of other advantages.

Also, for your information, you can export/import alerts and monitor from your SAS Environment Manager towards your enterprise monitoring system, and vice versa, therefore you have a world of integration and flexibility in front of you.

[Alok_Pal]

Thanks @JuanS_OCS, that really helped.