I'm pleased to announce release v1.2.0 of the SAS Viya Administration Checklist. This checklist has consistently been one of the most visited resources in the SAS Software site on GitHub. It is publicly accessible here:
https://github.com/sassoftware/viya4-admin-checklist
This release adds four new tasks:
Several contributing authors and I have also updated 28 of the existing tasks, making this release the biggest since the checklist's initial publication in May 2023.
If you are not already familiar with it, the SAS Viya Administration Checklist contains two lists of tasks. There is a suggested frequency for the regular tasks. You, as an IT administrator or a SAS administrator, should consider performing the tasks in these lists for the SAS Viya Platform environments that you maintain. Perform all tasks that are relevant to your environment to keep your SAS Viya deployment operating at its best over the long term.
About the new tasks
- Know how SAS Viya Authenticates to your OIDC Identity Provider: If you are using OpenID Connect with SAS Viya, SAS Logon Manager must authenticate to the provider as part of the authentication processing. This authentication can be done with either a clientSecret or private key JSON web tokens (JWTs), and those items may expire. This task provides links to documentation explaining how to check the configuration, and a post describing the configuration in more detail.
- Know when to renew OIDC Private Key JWT: If you are using OpenID Connect with SAS Viya, and are using private key JSON web tokens (JWTs) to authenticate to the OpenID Connect provider, this task explains how to find out whether the private key JSON web tokens have an expiry date and what that date is, or when the X.509 certificate containing the corresponding public key expires. It has links to the relevant documentation for Microsoft Entra ID and OKTA.
- Configure SAS Workload Management: SAS Workload Management is now enabled by default in new SAS Viya deployments. This new task describes how to plan and implement a queue configuration, with appropriate properties for job priority, preemption, resource management, permissions and auto-scaling. It also explains the benefits of monitoring of SAS Workload Orchestrator jobs, queues, hosts and logs in your preferred observability solution.
- Renew your OIDC JWT Signing Keys: Since you Know when to renew OIDC Private Key JWT, this regular task provides links to the documentation explaining how to renew the key, and reminders about what happens when you do. For example, your entire SAS Viya environment must be restarted when updating these values!
The tasks in the checklist were contributed in whole or in part by a number of authors including: Michael Erickson (15), Ajmal Farzam (11), Scott McCauley (9), Gerry Nelson (8), Stuart Rogers (7), Robert Hillier (1), Gilles Chrzaszcz and myself (49).
We welcome feedback, ideas and contributions, as described under Contributing in the project README. SAS employees who want to make a contribution, or have feedback or ideas about the checklist and its tasks are welcome to contact me.
The team have worked hard on this update and we hope you find it useful!
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