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DJWanna
Obsidian | Level 7

Our management has requested a report to track the health of our SAS environment. We have looked at Environment Manager and our management said that does not present the whole story in a way that non-SAS people can understand. Can anyone tell us what tool you use to monitor SAS? Is it a dashboard? What items do you feel are important to track?

 

Thank you for your advice/suggestions. We are running SAS9.4M5.

7 REPLIES 7
ballardw
Super User

It will probably help those who know more about the Admin tools than I do (essentially nothing) be describing which elements of "SAS Health" they are interested in and particularly those things "management said that does not present the whole story in a way that non-SAS people can understand".

 

If practical provide a copy of one or more of the reports your management can't understand quickly. Sending data into a nicer report generator may well be what is wanted.

DJWanna
Obsidian | Level 7
Good questions. Right now it is a totally manual process to keep track of when the servers are busy, down, or if they are running total fine. If down or busy then why. I can see if I can edit the document. I am interested to know who produces management level reports about a SAS environment.
SASKiwi
PROC Star

What OS do your SAS servers run on? Monitoring tools available will primarily depend on your OS. Where I work all production servers are routinely monitored for hardware and OS health. SAS Environment Manager primarily focuses on the health of your SAS server processes so the SAS and non-SAS tools are complementary to each other.

 

Does your company do routine monitoring of server hardware and their OS(s)? I'd be surprised if they didn't.

Lenvdb
Quartz | Level 8

I used to design some basic but helpful tools in VB.Net.

I wrote a number of Linux scripts to show as Text/CSV files: Drive volumes, Free space, Server Status. SASWork space consumption, and list of current SAS Jobs running per User. These would be updated every 15 mins.

The VB.Net App would run every 15 mins one min after the text files would update, and create a HTML Dashboard showing a pie chart with space avble, and list users etc.

 

This Dashboard was a useful tool to monitor with minimal interaction required.

Sadly - my managers assumed it was a tool SAS provided. It stopped working when I left...

DJWanna
Obsidian | Level 7

We do have a script that dumps a df command to a flat file and we read it in for directory sizes. That does help.

 

DJWanna
Obsidian | Level 7

We are running Linux RHEL 7.5. I produce graphs from NMON and even with a paragraph on the same page as a graph it is still hard for management to understand.

JuanS_OCS
Azurite | Level 17

Hello @DJWanna ,

 

yours is a great question. Here my thoughts:

 

  • SAS Environment Manager should not be used as main tool to monitor your SAS system, because it depends, to work, of many other SAS services, such as the Metadata and the Web, and many others. It is a great tool, though, for analysis, specially for the JVMs. 

 

  • For general monitoring, I would rather use tools as Nagios, Zabbix and such, broadly used in your company. In addition to SAS Environment Manager, I would use the monitoring tool used at enterprise level, and define what you would like to monitor, and create the dashboard as required. Give this taks to your IT teams.

 

  • In other hand, in the default configuration of SAS Environment Manager, it is true that it misses a dashboard already configured and which would already give a better overview to non-SAS users. However, you or a SAS consultant or partner can set a dashboard in SAS Environment Manager, which can be understood by anyone. This being said, you can also enable the EMI framework to get even more information of your SAS system, and additional reports from the Stored Processes provided by APM and ACM and Kits.

 

  • SAS Environment Manager, or the Enterprise Monitoring tool selected, will monitor resources (cpu, disk, etc), services/daemons and they can even monitor network traffic. However, there is no tool to monitor SAS jobs, their performance and peaks, and such. If you are interested in a tool to do this, perhaps you would be interested in looking into the Boemska Enterprise Session Monitor (ESM) https://boemskats.com/esm/ Anf you you would like to dive deeper, you could drop a message to @boemskats , he can explain much better.

 

I hope this can help you.

 

Kind regards,

Juan

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