SAS 9 Content Assessment: Inventory

This is the first of an occasional series of posts where we will look at a Content Assessment report and take a deep dive to 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. This series of posts will not cover how to run Content Assessment applications; instead, it will focus on using the results. For details on running Content Assessment, check out this post and this demo. This post will look at the SAS 9 Content Assessment Inventory.

Content Assessment Inventory

Inventory is, in many ways, the simplest of the Content Assessment reports. However, that does not make it any less important; it is the place you will likely start when reviewing Content Assessment results. The SAS Viya Inventory application scans SAS 9 systems and documents the type and volume of content. The scan includes the Metadata Server, file system areas and deployment and license information. Let’s look at the report.

What can we learn?

The initial page, “What is Being Used,” provides an overview of the content in the scanned 9.4 environment. It includes a high-level summary of object counts broken down by the SAS Software offering used. In addition, it includes a ranked frequency table listing all types of SAS 9.4 items found.

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Drill to counts gives detailed counts by object type segmented by portfolio and offering. In this tab, we can see unique counts for all objects in the SAS 9 deployment. In conjunction with the Overview tab, this tab can be used to determine the type and volume of content.

A few key facts from the report. In terms of SAS 9 objects, the environment has:

SAS Enterprise Guide Project
SAS OLAP Cubes
SAS Information Maps
SAS Data Integration Studio Jobs
SAS Stored Processes
SAS BI Reports
SAS Visual Analytics Reports
Access Control Templates (ACTs)

Drill to items gives us access to the detailed location of individual objects in the metadata or on the file system. In the example below we can see the name and location of the SAS Data Integration Studio Jobs.

Filesystem Object Info provides an inventory of file-system content in the areas scanned by the inventory tool. In addition to the location and type, the last modified and last accessed dates are provided, allowing you to identify if objects are being used.

The final two tabs of the report, Software Version and Hotfix Info and Software License Info provide details on the software installed and licensed in the SAS 9 environment.

To summarize from the Inventory report, we can learn what:

types of content and configuration are in the SAS 9 environment
is the volume of each type of content
is the location of the content in metadata or the file system
file system content has been recently updated or used

What do we do with what we learned?

The inventory results can provide input to a house-cleaning process on the SAS 9.4 environment. You may identify objects no longer used in the environment that you do not want to migrate to SAS Viya. Removing these objects at the source can make the migration more efficient. Make a plan to clean up any unused content from the source environment. Note that Inventory does not indicate whether a metadata object is being used. Information on some of the profile reports and the Content Assessment Application Usage report can used to determine usage levels of content. You can also have Enterprise Session Monitor running against the environment for a period of time and check those results.

The results of Inventory should provide a road map for which Profile reports you should focus on when planning the migration. SAS 9 Profile takes the analysis a step further and drills deeper into the specific characteristics of each type of object (report, job, cube, etc) found. SAS Content Assessment Profile contains a series of reports for each SAS 9.4 content type. The profile reports will give you additional information about the specifics of each content type. The specifics will influence the effort needed to migrate to SAS Viya.

Using inventory results, check for items that do not automatically migrate to SAS Viya. Our inventory has a few Web Report Studio Reports we know do not migrate to SAS Viya. In addition, we identified Access Control Template usage where we know there are limitations in the migration process. You can check the results against the “Resources that Migrate” section of the SAS Viya Administration guide. For SAS employees and Partners, the Migration Summary document can be used to get detailed information on what is and is not supported in relation to migration to SAS Viya.

To summarize, the results of inventory can be used to:

clean the SAS 9 environment before a migration
direct the next steps in the assessment process
plan for items that will not migrate automatically to SAS Viya

Wrap Up

Inventory is the simplest of the SAS Content Assessment reports. Creating an inventory is an important part of the migration assessment process and can help direct the next steps in planning a successful migration from SAS 9 to SAS Viya. We started with the easy one in this series, but stay tuned for a look at some of the other Content Assessment Reports. For further information on Migration from SAS 9.4 to Viya, check out these resources:

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