What Are the Top 10 Tips for SAS® Viya® Administrators? Q&A, Slides, and On-Demand Recording
Check out my Ask the Expert session on the Top 10 Tips for SAS® Viya® Administrators.
SAS administrators must create and perform many varied tasks. Not all of them are obvious or easy. It is useful to have a checklist of tasks to choose the most relevant, so you know what to do and when, to make the most of your SAS Viya deployment over the long term.
During this webinar, you will learn:
- What a SAS Viya administrator does.
- Which parts of SAS Viya administration are relevant to your role.
- How to use a checklist of SAS Viya administration tasks.
Links referenced in the presentation:
A Checklist of SAS Viya Administration Tasks
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggnl4UwYMog
- Search for SAS Viya Administration Tasks
- SAS Viya Checklist paper:
https://support.sas.com/resources/papers/checklist-sas-viya-administration-tasks.pdf
http://bit.ly/checklistofsasviyaadmintasks
Checklist of SAS 9 Admin Tasks
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y-qwZgcEO0
- SAS 9 checklist paper:
http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/Platform-Administration-Tasks.pdf
http://bit.ly/checklistofsasplatformadmintasks
Keep up-to-date with SAS updates
- http://ftp.sas.com/techsup/download/hotfix/HF2/Viya_home.html
- https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Hot-Fix-Announcements/bg-p/hf
- https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Product-Release/bg-p/tsrelease
Get Viya-ARK service management playbooks
mkdir ~/working
cd ~/working
GIT_REPO=https://github.com/sassoftware/viya-ark.git
BRANCH_TO_USE=master
git clone $GIT_REPO --branch $BRANCH_TO_USE
#remove old versions
rm -rf ~/sas_viya_playbook/viya-ark
# copy into the right playbook location
cp -r ~/working/viya-ark ~/sas_viya_playbook
ls -al ~/sas_viya_playbook/viya-ark/playbooks/viya-mmsu/viya-services-*
# Optional: delete leftovers
rm -rf ~/working
cd ~/sas_viya_playbookTo check the status of all services:
ansible-playbook viya-ark/playbooks/viya-mmsu/viya-services-status.ymlTo stop everything:
ansible-playbook viya-ark/playbooks/viya-mmsu/viya-services-stop.ymlTo start everything:
ansible-playbook viya-ark/playbooks/viya-mmsu/viya-services-start.ymlTo restart everything:
ansible-playbook viya-ark/playbooks/viya-mmsu/viya-services-restart.yml
Consider scripting regular tasks:
- SAS Administration Command-Line Interface (sas-admin CLI)
- https://developer.sas.com
- https://github.com/sassoftware/pyviyatools
Questions and Answers
Here are the questions from the Q&A segment held at the end of the webinar. The slides from the webinar are attached.
Is this [Tip #7: Relocate SAS Work Directory] only on SPRE?
Yes, this is only on SPRE.
How does this apply to Multi Tenancy?
Regarding security, multi-tenancy tenants are completely separate, so they are secured from each other. You still need a security model within each tenant as David described.
Does the Folder structure move between SAS 9.4 and Viya?
Yes, you can export the folder structure and a subset of the content from 9.4 to Viya.
Can this be done by allowing SAS to execute the backup command?
In Viya, backup can be run from the SAS Environment Manager UI or in batch from the SAS-admin command-line interface backup plugin.
I don't have any technical (server management) or programming background. I am a BA and my employer asked me to go for Admin training. I was told knowing Linux is either helpful or essential. What is your recommendation and recommended source to acquire that knowledge?
Linux training will be useful. If don’t have Linux training, it typically only takes a few days to learn enough to become useful, and shell commands you learn will likely remain valid for a long time. I don’t think you need to do a full course. At least, not to begin with. If you search for top 10 things you need to be useful you will find a wealth of information on the web. After 5 minutes searching the web for variations on “Introduction to RHEL bash”, I thought these sites looked pretty good:
- https://ryanstutorials.net/linuxtutorial/: looks pretty good at first glance
- http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Teaching/Unix/: I think this, or something very similar, has been helpful to new Linux users I’ve worked with before. There seem to be many variations of this same ‘course’ on a variety of academic sites
- https://tldp.org/guides.html: Someone on stackexchange.com recommended this collection of guides for learning Bash (the most popular shell - i.e. command line interface for Linux)
- Sites like https://stackexchange.com/ are amazing for example code and commands, and answers to specific questions. Generally, anything you want to do has been asked before, so rather than asking a new question and waiting for an answer (or to be told it is a duplicate of another question), just search the web for your question, and look for answers other people have already offered.
I don’t have any affiliation to, or deep knowledge of any of these. On a normal workday I don’t have the time or inclination to sit and work through a whole workshop. For formal training, yes sure, read the book or follow the workshop from start to finish and really pay attention. But that doesn’t happen often. Instead, pick and choose bits that are interesting to you from each, as you need to, and learn as you go by copying from other people’s examples. If you include them in your code, add a comment with some attribution, both for your own future reference and to give credit where it’s due to the original author. Our education team also has many resources available.
Oh, and the best way to learn is by working on it with a few other people who are already good at it. They’ll show you more than you would ever think to look up by yourself.
Is there a lab environment available where I can have hands-on experience in the SAS Viya environment?
We have several free trials available right now: https://www.sas.com/en_us/trials.html. You can also check out the SAS Viya Training from SAS Education: https://support.sas.com/training/us/paths/viya.html
Could you please let us know the main differences between SAS 9 & SAS Viya both functionally and architecture wise?
Check out this resource https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/support/en/technical-papers/sas9-4-sas-viya-functional-compariso....
What are your tips on becoming an architect from an administrator?
Well, despite my job title, I am not sure I would call myself a technical architect – at least not in front of a real one! I work with plenty of genuine technical, solution and enterprise architects, and I respect them hugely. I’m more of a blend of a programmer, solution architect, trainer, consultant and technical all-rounder.
But I think they would agree with some of the following suggestions: first, read, a lot! Read the documentation, read other technical architect’s design documents, work with them on designing solutions, and of course supplement this with formal training. Read books on the subjects and products you are working on.
I got a lot out of the ITIL and TOGAF training I attended here in the UK, and SAS has good SAS architecture courses. Talk to your employer’s HR Training team, and to architects in your company – they should have a good idea about how to combine formal training and certifications with opportunities to get real-world experience, which is totally essential in developing the skills needed. You have to do technical architecture to become a technical architect, but don’t be afraid, everyone has to start somewhere and everyone was new to it once.
And these days, make sure you include something about DevOps and Cloud in the things you learn. Technically, they are our future.
Does SAS have a checklist for SAS Grid Administration tasks?
We do not have a checklist specifically for SAS Grid on SAS 9, but there are some tasks for SAS Grid in my Checklist of SAS® Platform Administration Tasks paper, for example task #33 in that paper.
I had administered SAS Linux server through SAS management console. Is Viya server administered in the same way?
The SAS Environment Manager application in SAS Viya fulfils roughly the same role that SAS Management Console fulfilled in SAS 9.
I have some ideas. Can I contribute to the checklist?
You can reach out to David in the Ask the Expert Community.
In our organization, once a user got access to the server, home directory will be created automatically. But now shall we recreate a CASUSER directory in another location?
You don’t have to have a home directory on the CAS Server, but it’s useful because you have your own personal library. It depends whether the user's CAS session is running under their own account, or a shared account. If it’s a shared account, it’s not necessary to have the home directory. Take a look at Stuart Roger’s post on SAS Communities here: https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/SAS-Viya-3-5-Automatic-Home-Directories/ta-p/..., and use your browser to search for “CASUSER library” in the SAS® Viya® 3.5 Administration guide, under SAS® Cloud Analytic Services > Concepts (https://go.documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=calserverscas&docsetTarget=n05000viyaservers000000admin.h...). It is talking about sharing user home directories between a primary and a secondary CAS controller, but in doing so, it does explain when the home directory is needed for the CAS server:
For programming-only deployments and visual deployments that use the CASHostAccountRequired custom group, there is an additional requirement for users’ home directories. In these two cases, a user’s Casuser caslib is mapped to ~/casuser. Therefore, the home directories ($HOME) for all CAS users must be shared so that they can be accessed from both the controller and the backup controller machines. Sharing users’ home directories ensures that the path for the CASUSER library is available during CAS session start-up.
I implemented CAS automated user directory creation, but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t for new users. Also, SAS Studio requires users to connect to Linux first, then SAS Studio works. When disconnected from Linux session, the login shows "Access denied". Any suggestions?
This is probably resolved most easily with help from SAS Technical Support. Please get in touch and I’m sure they will be happy to help!
Does SAS plan to create a SAS Viya administration Certification?
Yes, but most likely sometime next year, in 2021.
Is there any certification for SAS Viya similar to SAS 9.4?
There are some certifications that have been updated for Viya, for example in Advanced Analytics https://www.sas.com/en_us/certification.html #advanced-analytics. I don't believe there are administrator certifications yet.
Regarding checklist item #18 about alerting, do you recommend any kind of tool for this?
I don’t have a preferred tool. Nagios (https://www.nagios.org/) is often used, but I’m not very familiar with it. Other SAS consultants and architects may have experiences with this or other products that they can share – do ask around!
How to calculate the required IOPs for /saswork. Is there a formula just like in SAS Grid?
There is no one right answer that fits everybody, but the same formula holds true as a baseline for Foundation SAS processing – if you can achieve a throughput of 150MB/sec per core (ref. SGF2020, paper SAS4313-2020 “How to Maintain Happy SAS® Viya Users” by Margaret Crevar, SAS Institute Inc.: https://www.sas.com/content/dam/SAS/support/en/sas-global-forum-proceedings/2020/4313-2020.pdf), then IOPs are unlikely to be the bottleneck. But it depends on your system workload. Work with a SAS architect, or SAS’s EEC to understand your workload so you understand what you need so you don’t have bottlenecks.
About SAS Backup -- Is it enough to enable back up services in SAS EM in Basic services or is there anything else you must do?
Yes, there is a lot you have to do too. An enterprise backup solution is the best answer, but it’s a really complex topic. The paper talks about this. To get the Backup Service itself to work, you also must make sure you have a shared directory and reference it in the property of the backup service. But I think your question may have been wider than that. Please talk to SAS Technical Support, or your local SAS consultant for more on this.
SSL implementation: Are we required to implement TLS certs for each and every SAS Viya web application or is implementing SASLOGON enough? Are there any specific links to follow this process?
That’s a complicated topic to cover in a short answer! Essentially, it has to do with whether you want your encryption to protect against attacks which gain access to your internal network, or whether you are happy to rely on a ‘tough outer shell’ to keep attackers out. The right answer depends on the sensitivity of your data, the likely costs to your organization if it is compromised, how much effort it will really be to set up and maintain TLS for internal process-to-process communication, what impact that extra encryption will have on your CPU usage and network traffic etc.
Regarding specific links to follow this process, try https://go.documentation.sas.com/?docsetId=dplyml0phy0lax&docsetVersion=3.5&docsetTarget=n0xe82w9qdy... and https://go.documentation.sas.com/?cdcId=calcdc&cdcVersion=3.5&docsetId=calencryptmotion&docsetTarget.... It’s a big topic, but your friendly local SAS architect is the best person to discuss this with – they have access to a lot of training on this exact topic.
Recommended Resources
SAS Viya Administration Checklist
Video: Top 10 SAS Viya Administration Tasks
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