Using aliases with SAS Visual Investigator – and now with Viya 3.3

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SAS Viya has brought us a plethora of new capabilities, features, and possibilities. Some are little ones that may go unnoticed, until you take advantage of them and you wonder, how could I have done without this before? Here is one of these. When compared to SAS 9, you may have noticed how easy it is to access web applications using an alias with Viya. Actually, even multiple aliases. This holds true also for SAS Visual Investigator. You simply have to perform one additional step to register the alias(es) within the environment.

What's your name, again?

You are an experienced SAS installer and, as such, you always perform your pre-installation duties.

You did not forget to ask and you've been told that the environment you are going to install will be presented to end-users through the alias https://myalias.customer.com. That's the name you used to perform the deployment and, with SAS 9, both the metadata server and middle tier configuration files now hold this information.

As soon as the installation is done, someone tells you that, wait, that name has to be changed. You start yelling invest some time and, armed with the knowledge coming from the Middle tier Administration guide, you do it. What if your customer wants to access the environment using multiple aliases? For example, they may want a different address when using the system through an internal proxy versus an external one. Sometimes network configurations and strict firewall rules may cause this request to be hard to satisfy.

You can call me whatever you want

The good news with SAS Viya is: all of that is gone. Simply use whatever address you want and, as long the browser is able to resolve it to the server hosting the Apache http server acting as a proxy to Viya web applications, you're in.

Well, almost.

If you are deploying SAS Visual Investigator, there is actually one additional configuration to perform. Otherwise, when you use a valid alias in the browser, it gets resolved, but you get an error page from SASLogon:

The key here is the highlighted message: The subdomain does not map to a valid identity zone.

What does it mean? Without entering into technical details, it has to do with the SASLogon capabilities to support multi-tenancy. SASLogon wants to know every possible alias you could use to call it, to prevent users from unauthorized tenants to access the applications.

SAS Visual Investigator has this additional check turned on, whether you are using a multi-tenant or a single-tenant environment.

Seven easy steps

To add our alias(es) to SASLogon it's enough to specify them in Consul, in the property

config/SASLogon/zones/internal/hostnames.

With SAS Visual Investigator we do not have SAS Environment Manager, so we use the command-line utility sas-bootstrap-config to manage Consul properties.

In the following steps, note that we are not replacing the existing values, but adding one or more entries (the aliases) to it.

 

Viya 3.3

Viya 3.3 has just been released. One of the most anticipated features of the new version is the support for multi-tenancy across all solutions. When multi-tenancy is configured, Viya 3.3 behaves, with respect to aliases, just as we have seen, above, with SAS Visual Investigator. Again, the trick is to add any alias we wish to use to the config/SASLogon/zones/internal/hostnames property; the difference is that, with SAS Visual Analytics, we use SAS Environment Manager to perform this task, as shown in the following images.

Select the Configuration icon, then Definitions from the View drop-down:

 Filter for zones. If the property does not exist, it has to be created from new:

 If the property already exists, it can be edited:

Append the name of the new aliases to the existing value, and save:

Remember to restart the SASLogon microservice after this change.

Conclusion

The more we learn to use Viya, the more we find new interesting features. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!  

Edoardo Riva