SAS 9 Content Assessment: Application Usage

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In this second in a series of posts on the SAS 9 Content Assessment reports, we look at the SAS 9 Application Usage report and review what information the report provides, what conclusions can be drawn from the information, and what likely actions you would take after reviewing the report.

As a reminder, this series of posts does not cover how to run SAS Content Assessment applications; instead, it focuses on using the results. For information about running SAS Content Assessment, check out this post and this demo. In the first post in the series, we looked at the SAS 9 Inventory report, a great place to start when planning a migration from SAS 9.4 to SAS Viya. Now let’s look at the SAS 9 Application Usage.

SAS Content Assessment Application Usage

SAS Stored Process and Workspace Servers interact with SAS by creating a server process for each client connection. The client user who makes the request owns the server process. Each server process enables client programs to perform SAS processing and retrieve the results. When a client requests a SAS Server, the SAS Object Spawner manages the request. In SAS 9.4, many client applications use the SAS Object Spawner. The Object spawner logs each request for a server. Here is an excerpt from the Object Spawner logs showing a connection by user barbara using the Stored Process Web Application.

2024-11-17T00:02:01,685 INFO [00170292] :sasinst - New out call client connection (19019) for

user barbara@meta01.

2024-11-17T00:02:01,685 INFO [00170292] :barbara@meta01 - New client connection (19015) accepted

from server port 8591 for SAS token user barbara@meta01. APPNAME=Stored Process Web App 9.4.

2024-11-17T00:02:01,691 INFO [00170292] :barbara@meta01 - Created process 7537 using credentials

sassrv for user barbara@meta01 (child id 895).

2024-11-17T00:02:01,812 INFO [00170302] :sasinst - New out call client connection (19010) for

launched server (child 895). Peer IP address and port are [::ffff:10.96.1.118]:35055.

2024-11-17T00:02:01,814 INFO [00170302] :sasinst - Client connection 19015 for user

barbara@meta01 closed.

SAS Content Assessment uses the log records of the SAS Object Spawner to populate the data for the SAS 9 Application Usage report. That data includes information about:

Accessed applications
Users invoking these applications

What can we learn?

The report contains historical trends and usage patterns by user and application.

The initial Overview page summarizes information on application usage. It identifies the number of SAS Object Spawners and the number of active users, applications, and total connections. This page gives you a general idea of the ongoing activity levels in your SAS 9.4 environment. You can subset the content by deployment or by SAS Object Spawner (in the case of an environment where multiple SAS Object Spawners are defined).

NOTE: be aware that results are derived from applications using the Object Spawner. Not all SAS 9 applications use the Object Spawner.

Select any image to see a larger version.
Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.

The Timeline page graphs the volume of connections by user and application over time. On this page, you can identify the trends in the usage of your client applications. For example, our page shows a steady growth in the number of daily connections in November. The connection and user counts are grouped by application in the lower two graphs.

You can select a client application to see trends for that specific application. Below, we have selected the Stored Process Web Application.

The User Details page shows the usage history by user and application. For security reasons by default, user names are obfuscated and a mapping file is provided to match the real name to the obfuscated name (\SAS9ContentAssessment\assessment\results\user_map_final.csv).

Obfuscation has been turned off in the report below to better illustrate the content. The report lists the users by frequency of connection and can answer questions like:

Who is the most active user?
Which users are inactive?
Which SAS applications are being used the most?
Which are being used the least?
Is the usage of each type of application increasing or decreasing?

When interpreting the results be aware that there are some functional accounts in the report that are not tied to a real user, for example, sasev@saspw and sassrv.

What do we do with what we learned?

In the early stages of a migration engagement, the data in this report can help identify the mix of SAS Viya software needed to support the migration of the SAS 9.4 content. For example, if you see heavy usage of SAS Enterprise Miner, you know you will need SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning on SAS Viya.

In addition, it can reveal usage patterns that might impact the effort and complexity of a migration. For example, the report above shows a high volume of SAS Stored Process Web Application usage. SAS stored processes migrate to SAS Viya jobs. This application's high usage suggests a next step: reviewing the SAS 9 Profile report for stored processes to gather more information about how they are used.

The report can identify the volume of usage in areas where automated migration is not fully supported, such as SAS Web Report Studio or SAS BI Dashboard. In planning a migration, alternate plans might be needed to support the content of these applications.

The Timeline page can help identify SAS 9 applications that are used and SAS 9 applications that are installed but not currently used.

Wrap Up

The SAS 9 Content Assessment Application usage report contains historical trends and usage patterns of SAS 9 Applications by user and time. Content Assessment retrieves the data for the report from the SAS 9 Object Spawner logs. The Application Usage report can help identify the usage patterns of SAS 9 software in preparation for migrating to SAS Viya. You can use the information on the report to plan for the software mix you may need in SAS Viya, to understand how the SAS 9 Software is used, and to determine how that usage can be maintained and enhanced in a Viya environment.

For further information on Migration from SAS 9.4 to Viya, check out these resources: