SAS 9 Content Assessment: the Profile report for SAS Enterprise Guide Migration

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In this continuation of posts about SAS 9 Content Assessment reports, we look at the SAS 9 Profile for SAS Enterprise Guide Migration report and review what information it provides, what conclusions can be drawn, and what likely actions you would take after reviewing it. 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 the SAS Content Assessment, check out his post and this demo.

SAS Content Assessment Profile Application

The SAS Content Assessment Profile application provides detailed information about the attributes of SAS 9 content. Profile delivers reports for each SAS 9.4 content type. The reports include details like:

Tasks used in SAS Enterprise Guide projects
Transformations used in SAS Data Integration Studio projects
Users, groups, and group memberships
Encoding of SAS data

The profile application and the various reports help you to understand the details of SAS 9 content and how those details impact migration to SAS Viya.

SAS 9 Profile for Enterprise Guide Projects Migration

The SAS 9 Profile for SAS Enterprise Guide Migration report covers SAS Enterprise Guide projects.

SAS Enterprise Guide projects are made up of tasks (the nodes in the projects). Projects migrate to SAS Studio flows, which include steps (the nodes in the SAS Studio flows). Each process flow within a SAS Enterprise Guide project migrates to a SAS Studio flow.

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The migration process attempts to migrate a task to an equivalent step or steps in SAS Studio. If a task cannot be migrated to equivalent step(s), it is often migrated to a SAS Program step in SAS Studio that includes SAS code to perform the function of the task. A task might not migrate to an equivalent step because there is no matching step in SAS Studio. A good example of this would be “Update Library Metadata” because there is no metadata server in SAS Viya.

The SAS 9 Profile for SAS Enterprise Guide Migration report helps you to understand what will happen to SAS Enterprise Guide projects and their tasks during the migration process from SAS 9 to SAS Viya.

What can we learn?

The Overview tab in the report provides a summary of the status of all projects in the deployment. Currently, there are 23 projects in the deployment, with 18 of them being considered “migration candidates.” A migration candidate is a SAS project that is highly likely to succeed when migrating to SAS Viya. The number of migration candidates is determined by counting the SAS Enterprise Guide projects that contain only tasks that will migrate to SAS Viya. If all tasks will migrate, the project is a migration candidate (more details below).

The Profiled Project Details tab documents the projects' locations, SAS Enterprise Guide versions, and creation and update dates.

The Project Migration Concerns tab identifies project-level issues in the scanned projects. These projects will migrate; however, there are some items in a project that are either currently not converted to a corresponding feature or that might need manual intervention once migration is complete. A list of the type of project-level concerns that may be surfaced is provided.

Select the Project Item Migration Details tab to see the detailed analysis for each project and each task in a project. This tab helps you understand what will happen to the tasks within a project when the project migrates to a SAS Studio flow. The report classifies a task as Ideal Fit, Partial Fit, Code Fit, No Fit, or Undetermined Fit. A task is considered:

Ideal Fit: The task’s migration is automatic. All features or functionality used are maintained.
Partial Fit: The task’s migration is automatic. All features or functionality used are maintained. After migration, an attribute might need to be set or a relationship to another object might need to be verified.
Code Fit: The task’s migration is automatic. Most features or functionality used are maintained using code in a SAS Program step.
No Fit: The task cannot be migrated, and there is no planned feature replacement for it in SAS Viya.
Undetermined Fit: The task was unable to be profiled or evaluated for migration status.

Tasks within a project that are profiled will fall into one of the categories mentioned above.

The Project Item Migration Details tab allows you to explore the details about the task migration. It allows you to select an individual project and explore what will happen to the specific tasks in it. Let us look at the Financial Master project.

On the Project Item Migration Details tab, we have selected Financial_Master_v4 (the project shown in the image at the start of this post).  The project is a migration candidate because all tasks are either ideal fit, partial fit, or code fit. Notice that the status of each task is listed, and for those tasks that are not ideal fit, a reason is provided in the Conversion Message column.

The Project Item Conversion Messages tab gives us a task-based view.  The table on the left of the page shows the most frequently used SAS Enterprise Guide tasks in the SAS 9 environment and the steps that they become in SAS Viya. In this report, Query was the most used task. The table to the right shows the most common conversion messages for these tasks. Notice that the Query tasks will migrate to Query steps in SAS Studio in 28 cases, but there are five cases where the task will migrate to a SAS Program step, and the reason is provided in the conversion message in the table.

Another key piece of information from this tab is the SAS Studio licenses that are required for the equivalent steps in SAS Viya.

The Overall Project Migration tab is where we can take the next step in the migration journey. The projects listed on this tab can be downloaded to a CSV file that will drive the migration process. The CSV file is used as input to the SAS Content Assessment Import EG Projects application that imports SAS Enterprise Guide projects on the file system to the SAS Viya 4 platform. The application will iterate through the CSV file, importing each SAS Enterprise Guide project.

What do we do with what we learned?

The SAS 9 Profile for SAS Enterprise Guide Migration report offers a detailed analysis of our SAS Enterprise Guide projects, highlighting project characteristics, task usage, and migration readiness. What can we do with this information?

Identify Licenses Needed in SAS Viya

SAS Studio is currently available with three licenses: SAS Studio, SAS Studio Analyst, and SAS Studio Engineer. By documenting the license required for the tasks, the SAS 9 Profile for SAS Enterprise Guide Migration report identifies what level of SAS Studio is needed to run the resulting SAS Studio flows.

Prioritize Projects for Migration

Using the report, you can prioritize the migration of projects in the environment that are classified as migration candidates. These projects should migrate easily, with minimal adjustments, and take full advantage of equivalent steps in SAS Studio. Similarly, you can identify high-risk or complex projects that might require additional effort.

Remediate Partial Fit and Code Fit Tasks

The report identifies tasks in projects classified as Partial Fit. These tasks require targeted remediation. The report’s conversion messages help identify specific issues. Remediation can happen in the source environment or in SAS Viya after the migration.

Evaluate No Fit and Undetermined Fit Tasks

Tasks labeled as No Fit or Undetermined Fit might require a redesign or alternative implementation strategies in SAS Viya. These tasks should be reviewed to determine whether functionality can be replicated using supported features in SAS Viya or if custom development is needed.

Automate Project Import with CSV Integration

The Overall Project Migration tab allows the export of the project list to a CSV file. The CSV file is used as input to the import EG projects application. This enables the automated import of selected projects, streamlining the migration process and reducing manual effort. Projects can also be imported individually with SAS Viya Environment Manager and the transfer plug-in of the SAS Viya CLI.

Wrap Up

The SAS 9 Profile for SAS Enterprise Guide Migration report helps assess the migration status of SAS Enterprise Guide projects. It analyzes each project and its tasks, identifying whether the projects are candidates for migration to SAS Studio flows. The report classifies tasks into categories (Ideal Fit, Partial Fit, Code Fit, No Fit, or Undetermined Fit) and classifies projects as migration candidates or not. It highlights licensing needs for SAS Studio and supports migration planning by generating a list of projects ready for migration.

The report helps to plan and execute the migration of SAS Enterprise Guide projects to SAS Studio flows on SAS Viya. It helps identify the appropriate SAS Studio license needed based on task requirements, it prioritizes projects that are ready for migration, and it flags projects needing remediation or redesign. The information in the report can be used to identify the usage of projects, which can lead to cleaning up projects before migration.

Here are some related resources, including the other posts in this series:

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