Finding if scheduled SAS job ran successfully in Virtual Machine

[podarum]

Hi, I am running a scheduled SAS job each day in the VDI (Virtual Desktop) and I would like to know if there is a creative way to notify me (either though email or other) if the daily job ran successful or not.. If there is success then I leave it as is, if it's not then I have to go in and manually re-run it.  Perhaps a way that notifies me if there are more then 6 error messages (6 is normal as there is a connection error I always get) then send a notification?  Thanks in advance.

[Quentin · Accepted solution]

Hi,

How are you scheduling the job?

Typically, the scheduler (LSF or whatever) should make it easy to say "if job fails, then email me" when you set up the job.

But for a rule like "if there are more than 6 error messages," you'll likely need to write your own log scanning to count errors.  So either at the end of the job, or in a separate scheduled job, you read in the log (it's just a text file) as data, and parse it to look for error messages (and bad notes and bad warnings) and count them up.  If you search lexjansen.com for "log scanner" or "log parser" you should find lots of examples of approaches to log scanning, and emailing as well.

The setup I use is at the end of every scheduled job, I parse the log and then append a summary record to a joblog.sas7bdat dataset which has the name of the job, the time it ran, the number of errors detected, and other job metadata.  And every night I have a job that checks that dataset to make sure every expected job has run, and that all jobs completed without errors.  It any errored, it emails me a little report.