As Copilot capabilities become more widely used in SAS Viya, understanding how these features are being adopted in real environments is increasingly important.
Questions such as who is using Copilot, how often, and in what context often arise—from customers, administrators, and support teams alike. While safety mechanisms and guardrails are fundamental, observability plays a key role in building trust, supporting troubleshooting, and enabling meaningful feedback.
This post introduces Viya GenAIMonitor, an unofficial, community-led tool created to explore these observability needs.
Because Observality Matters
The initial goal of this project was to enable a clearer way to retrieve and review prompts and responses generated by Copilot. Access to real conversations can help:
- Review how users interact with Copilot features
- Identify response quality issues, including potential hallucinations
- Support troubleshooting and customer-reported scenarios
- Inform future improvements through real usage examples
As development progressed, the scope naturally expanded to include broader usage observability, helping teams better understand how Copilot is being used across different environments.
What Is Viya4 GenAI Monitor?
Viya GenAIMonitor is a lightweight, browser-based dashboard that connects to a SAS Viya Platform through a local Python proxy.
It enables read-only access to SAS Viya Copilot conversations, making it possible to:
- View active and historical Copilot chat sessions
- Explore conversations by user, chat ID, or free-text search
- Understand usage patterns across environments
- Safely retrieve chats for troubleshooting or analysis
The design follows a few strict principles:
- Read-only access
- Local-first architecture
- No external services
- No stored credentials
Everything stays within the environment.
Intended Audience
This community tool may be useful for:
- Technical Support teams retrieving conversations to assist with analysis and troubleshooting
- Customer administrators seeking visibility into Copilot usage within their environments
- End users or power users revisiting previous chats or commonly used prompts
- Anyone who needs to retrieve or review SAS Viya Copilot conversations for learning or analysis purposes
Community and Contribution
Viya GenAIMonitor is a community-developed tool and is not officially supported by SAS Standard Support.
That said, feedback and discussion are encouraged. Customers and community members are welcome to:
- Ask questions
- Share observations or suggestions
- Provide feedback based on real-world usage
These conversations can take place through the project’s GitHub page or within the SAS Communities platform, depending on what is most convenient.
Community input plays an important role in shaping ideas, identifying opportunities for improvement, and exploring how Copilot observability can better support real customer needs.
Closing Thoughts
As Copilot features continue to evolve, visibility into real-world usage can help improve understanding, support, and trust. This project represents one community-driven exploration of that space.
If observability of Copilot usage in SAS Viya is relevant to your work, you are welcome to review the project, share feedback, or contribute.
