Alternative to Auditing for Report Usage in SAS Viya Visual Analytics

[sergie89]

I'm looking for statistics on the usage of reports in SAS Viya Visual Analytics. I understand that this can be obtained by enabling auditing, but I was wondering: is it also possible to extract this information from the sas visualanalytics log file, or from any other log files?

[BrunoMueller]

Please provide the version information on SAS Viya you are interessted in.

As of SAS Viya 20nn.nn there are no longer traditional log files.

The information on which reports have been accessed, can be returned using the sas-viya audit list-activities command (tested with Stable 2025.06).

Here is an example:

sas-viya --output json audit list-activities --application-contains Visual --sort-by timeStamp --limit 100 --action read --user-interaction-contains Open

The command will return JSON output. A activity entry will look like below.

    {
      "action": "read",
      "administrativeAction": false,
      "application": "SAS® Visual Analytics",
      "correlator": "dfd7180f-c19f-4dd8-847a-2b35f1dbebc3",
      "httpContext": {
        "method": "GET",
        "statusCode": 200
      },
      "id": "7fca62e6-ccc1-4aba-8897-2d10efdffb1a",
      "links": [
        {
          "href": "/audit/activities/7fca62e6-ccc1-4aba-8897-2d10efdffb1a",
          "method": "GET",
          "rel": "self",
          "type": "application/vnd.sas.audit.activity",
          "uri": "/audit/activities/7fca62e6-ccc1-4aba-8897-2d10efdffb1a"
        }
      ],
      "objectName": "cars-simple",
      "objectType": "report",
      "properties": {
        "referringApplication": "SASVisualAnalytics"
      },
      "references": [],
      "secure": true,
      "serviceName": "reports",
      "sessionId": "a8bbbb4b-d8f0-4e38-ab06-df83840d430b",
      "state": "success",
      "timeStamp": "2025-07-16T13:43:50.037Z",
      "type": "resource",
      "uri": "/reports/reports/130a9b58-d93b-4f24-8478-ff02d416ff3b/content",
      "user": "sean",
      "userInteraction": "Open report cars-simple",
      "version": 8
    }

A non admin user will only see his entries.

A SAS admin will see all entries

There are many more options to the mentioned command. For instance to select a specifc time window using --after and|or --before. Note the --limit option, by default only 50 entries are returned.

[sergie89]

Hi @BrunoMueller 

We're still on version V.03.05. It's quite an old version by now.

[gwootton]

You could look at the /var/log/httpd/ssl_access_log for /reports/reports/*/content

[BrunoMueller]

In SAS Viya 3.5 the activity entries are not available.

See this article https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Communities-Library/Auditing-Report-Actions-in-SAS-Viya-3-x/ta-p/... by for more details on auditing report operations.

Or go the way as outline by @gwootton .