SAS Viya 3 Content Assessment: a key to planning migrations to SAS Viya

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SAS 9 Content Assessment has long been a valuable tool to help in the migration journey from SAS 9.4 to SAS Viya. Now available, the SAS Viya 3 Content Assessment is designed to help organizations evaluate and prepare their SAS Viya 3.5 environment for migration to SAS Viya 4.

There are currently two applications available in SAS Viya 3 Content Assessment: Inventory and System Evaluation. In a previous post, I covered System Evaluation. SAS Viya 3.5 Inventory has been available for some time; recently, it underwent an update to enhance its functionality. In this post, we will delve into the details of SAS Viya 3.x Inventory.

SAS Viya 3 Content Assessment

There are two approaches to migrating from SAS Viya 3 to SAS Viya 4: system migration, which migrates a whole SAS Viya 3 environment to SAS Viya 4, and content migration, which exports and imports specific content between a SAS Viya 3 and a SAS Viya 4 environment. Regardless of which approach you choose, Content Assessment is a key application that provides detailed information to plan the migration.

SAS Viya 3 Content Assessment uses an Ansible playbook to evaluate your SAS system, inventory your SAS content, and optionally backup your SAS Viya 3 environment. If you choose to perform a system migration you will also use the playbook to package your SAS Viya 3 system.

The Plan and Backup Ansible playbook is delivered by the inventory plugin of the sas-admin CLI. The inventory plug-in generates the playbook, which can be used to evaluate, inventory and backup a SAS Viya 3 environment. Let’s look at the process for performing inventory, and then we will explore how to interpret and use the results.

Running SAS Viya 3 Inventory

To get started, as the same user who will run the Plan and Backup Ansible playbook, download the latest sas-admin CLI from support.sas.com. You must also download the most recent version of the inventory, CAS, and backup plug-ins. The plugins are installed or updated using the sas-admin plugins command. The minimum version of the plugins required at the time of writing are:

inventory 1.10.20 or higher
cas 1.12.10 or higher
backup 1.6.3 or higher

The command below generates the playbook and supporting files and stores them in the /tmp/inventory-playbook directory.

./sas-admin inventory generate-playbook --output-location /tmp/inventory-playbook

Directory contents:

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To run the playbook, you should use the inventory.ini file that was used to deploy the SAS Viya 3.5 environment. The inventory.ini file defines the inventory of machines (hosts) and their roles in the Viya 3.5 deployment. The inventory.ini file will most likely be in your Viya 3.5 project directory. To use the playbook, copy the files from the temporary directory into the Viya 3.5 project directory.

Prior to running the playbook, you need to do a little configuration. Firstly, provide the credentials of a member if the SAS Administrators group in the viya_credentials.txt file.

Secondly, set the variables in viya_plan_backup_vars.yaml file. Some of the key variables in the vars file are shown below:

endpointServer: which is the URL of the SAS Viya 3 server
inventoryResultsLocation: the location to store the inventory results files
evaluationResultsLocation: the location to store the evaluation results files
reportCASServer : the CAS server where the result data will be loaded
SAS_BACKUP_ID: an ID for the SAS Viya 3.x migration package (must be unique for each run)
migrationPackageLocation: the storage location for the SAS Viya 3.x migration package.

The recent update introduced some new settings which are worth mentioning:

sasExecutionHost is the bost where the SAS Programming run time is located.
COLLECT_PARENT_FOLDER: tells the playbook to collect the parent folder for all objects stored in SAS Viya folders. The default is false because this function is processing intensive. It is very useful, though so if you are happy to wait for results you can change it to true..
prepareUploads: can be set to true to prepare your data for sharing with SAS. This enables the creation and archiving of encrypted published results.
uploadsLocation: specifies the directory used to store results intended to be shared with SAS.

All variables in the viya_plan_backup_vars.yaml file are well commented with the details of how to use them. To scan file locations other than the default file systems that SAS Viya 3 uses you can add paths to the PATHLISTFILE parameter file.

You run the playbook from the command-line. If no parameters are provided the playbook performs an inventory scan and a backup. It accepts two parameters (tags) that will change that behavior.

evaluate
inventoryscan

It is a good practice to run a system evaluation first, followed by inventory. System evaluation provides the status of the environments eligibility to migrate to SAS Viya 4 using system migration. You can then run with a backup if you decide to proceed with the system migration. In a previous post I looked at the evaluation play and how it identifies if the SAS Viya 3.5 environment meets the baseline requirements for migration to SAS VIya.

To perform an inventory, change into the directory that contains your inventory.ini file and run the viya-plan-backup.yml playbook passing the tag inventoryscan.

cd sas_viya_playbook/
ansible-playbook viya-plan-backup.yml --tags 'inventoryscan'

The scan results are loaded to tables in the SystemData CAS library.

The inventory scan tasks also create a SAS Visual Analytics report in JSON format. Before using the report in SAS Environment Manager, you must import the JSON file using SAS Environment Manager.

SAS Viya 3 Content Assessment inventory: what can we learn?

The SAS Viya Inventory report is available at Products > SAS Environment Manager > Dashboard Items.

The Status tab gives an overview of the SAS artifacts processed by the inventory scan, categorizing the counts by service artifacts stored in the infrastructure data server, CAS artifacts stored in the CAS server and Filesystem artifacts stored on the file system.

The What’s Being Used tab provides an overview of the licensed Software by Portfolio and Sellable offering and counts the content item by selected Portfolio. This tab can help in planning what software needs to be licensed in SAS Viya 4.

The CAS Inventory tab documents CAS libraries and CAS tables providing counts and volume of data by various types of CAS library, allowing insights into data distribution and storage utilization.

The Filesystem Inventory tab helps understand SAS files in the filesystem and reveals how data is stored and utilized. Filtering by filesystem and extension allows you to explore usage by organization or file type.

The two tabs What's Being Accessed and What's Being Modified can work together to identify what file system resources are actively used in the environment.

On the What's Being Accessed files are classified as Hot, Warm, and Cold representing how recently files were used by a SAS program or application. The Last Accessed On date tells you the most recent time the file was opened, read, or otherwise used. It does not mean the content changed - just that someone looked at it or a system read it. Only files with last accessed date values are shown in the tables and filters. You can change thresholds to filter the files. This report can help you identify what files are being used and any that are not, so that you can prioritize the migration.

Similarly, the What's Being Modified classifies files as Hot, Warm, and Cold depending on how recently files were modified. The report is based on the last modified data of a file which identifies the last time the file was changed, including edited, updated, or overwritten. Again, this report can help you identify what files are being used and any that are not, so that you can prioritize the migration.

The Object Inventory tab provides an inventory of SAS Viya content created by users and SAS Viya services. The object inventory can help you identify the type and volume and location of content stored in the SAS infrastructure data server. You can switch between customer objects and Internal objects. The Parent Folder column will display folder information if the COLLECT_PARENT_FOLDER variable is set to true in viya_plan_backup_vars.yml

The Deployment Provisioning tab describes the environment, including CAS topology and layout, SAS Infrastructure Data Server size, and minimum resource requirements. This information allows you to plan the topology of your target CAS environment and estimate the resource requirements in terms of disk space and CPU for SAS Viya 4.

The CAS Backup Planning tab identifies critical CAS libraries and the volume of data in each library. It flags CAS library paths as NFS mounted or not. This can help you decide whether the data needs to be migrated to SAS Viya or whether SAS Viya can access the data from the NFS server.

A new tab Transfer Packages tab lists the transfer packages that are stored in the infrastructure data server. The tab supports exporting to a CSV file, and the CSV file can be used with the transfer plug-in on the SAS VIYA CLI to delete the packages.

SAS Viya 3 Content Assessment inventory: What do we do with what we learned?

So how do we use the information from the SAS Viya 3 Content Assessment.

Plan for the migration

From the Inventory report, we can learn about the types of content and configurations present in the SAS Viya 3 environment, the volume of each content type, the location of the content within metadata or the file system, and whether file system content has been recently updated or accessed. These insights from the inventory can be used to clean the environment before a migration, guide the next steps in the assessment process by identifying the most used content items, and plan for items that may not automatically migrate to SAS Viya.

Plan for Viya 4 licenses and architecture

The reports can help determine the appropriate mix of SAS Viya software that needs to be licensed to support the migration of Viya 3.5 content. In addition, the reports can help to plan the Viya 4 deployment to ensure the target environment has the necessary resources in terms of memory CPU and storage. Also ensure that there is enough room to store the backup package during the migration process.

Getting Help

The reports provide a lot of detailed information. If you need it, you can get help from SAS to understanding what your results mean. You can send your results from the inventory scan tasks and evaluate tasks to SAS. Sharing your results with SAS influences future migration development priority. When you publish your results, they are encrypted and protected with an encrypted key. The steps to share results with SAS are documented here.

Wrap Up

SAS Viya 3 Content Assessment includes Inventory and System Evaluation applications to support migration planning to SAS Viya 4. The inventory application uses an Ansible playbook, generated via the sas-admin CLI, to scan your Viya 3.x environment. It includes a report that offers detailed insights into system usage, data distribution, file activity, and resource requirements—helping prioritize and plan a smooth migration.

Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here.