With the continuous delivery of the new SAS Viya, it’s imperative that you as an administrator understand what is new and different in each release. SAS has created a new Release Notes UI that allows you to quickly filter the complete list of Deployment Notes and What’s New content to your specific product, area of interest, and versions. Here’s the link: http://release-notes.sas.com This is how the UI looks today when nothing is selected (but we’re continuously improving, so this will be out of date quite soon):     Notice that the Apply Filters button is inactive. On the left side of the page, you select the offerings and/or general categories that you are concerned with. You must select at least one item from the left side. On the right side of the page, you’ll find supported versions of SAS Viya. Select the version or range of versions and the type of release notes you are interested in. You must select a version or range, and at least one type of release note. Let’s go through that in a bit more detail. As a SAS Viya customer you’ll have licensed one or more offerings. Select these offerings under Products and Solutions. As an admin you’ll also be very interested in the platform-level changes to deployment and administration. Select those General Categories too. Under Versions select a version or range of versions. If you are updating from 2021.1.2 to 2021.1.4 you can select a range of 2021.1.3 to 2021.1.4 to see all the changes since your last deployment. The release notes are divided into What’s New, which will generally be of more interest to the end-user, and Deployment Notes, which will highlight changes to the deployment process. You must select at least one of these Types. With those selections in place the Apply Filters button becomes active.   Click Apply Filters, to see the release notes. ... View more

The new SAS Viya, beginning with SAS Viya 2020.1 in November of 2020, represents an exciting new era for SAS. I wanted to give you a quick overview and summary of the administration, deployment, and operations documentation available to you. Broadly speaking, there are two sets of documentation you need to be aware of if you want to manage SAS Viya: The SAS Viya Operations Help Center covers all that you need to deploy, migrate, update, and operate your SAS Viya environment. The intended audience is the Kubernetes administrator. The SAS Viya Administration Help Center covers everything else: security, scheduling, logging, monitoring, and the admin tools (SAS Environment Manager and the SAS Viya command-line interface).  Importantly, it also covers promotion, which is the process of moving SAS 9.4 content to SAS Viya.  The intended audience for this content is the SAS administrator. How does your role impact which documentation is best for you? If you are both the Kubernetes admin and the SAS admin, you’ll need all the content. The rule of thumb is: if you need any kind of Kubernetes privileges to perform a task (e.g., to issue a kubectl command), those instructions are in the SAS Viya Operations Help Center. If you are solely the Kubernetes admin and don’t know much about SAS, the SAS Viya Operations Help Center is your friend. We’ve intentionally tried to keep the SAS jargon to a minimum and write with you in mind. Your SAS admin can help you understand the context of some of the tasks. You’ll find your SAS admin to be helpful and knowledgeable – reach out to them. If you have only SAS admin duties, you will find that some familiar administrative tasks now require elevated Kubernetes permissions. Get to know your Kubernetes admin. You are going to need their help from time to time—chocolates are rarely a bad idea. SAS will be releasing monthly updates. As such it is imperative that you know which version of the documentation you are looking at. The version selector, shown below, is an easy way to jump between versions and confirm that you are reading the right content.  Hopefully, as the admin, you’ll know which version you have installed or are in the process of installing.   I hope this brief primer helps you get oriented. We are really looking forward to sharing the new SAS Viya with you.  ... View more

You might have noticed that in SAS Viya 3.4, SAS provided a combined PDF of the SAS Viya Admin guide, but that we stopped doing so for SAS Viya 3.5. On this page you can see the link to the PDF, and here's the direct link to the 3.4 version.   We recognize that, while we are promoting the benefits of using the SAS Help Center admin guide, many people still like the portability and printability of a PDF.   As our documentation has become more dynamic and more readily updated it has become a real problem to maintain and update that combined PDF. So for the 3.5 we're offering a different route to a PDF experience.   All the PDFs that make up the Viya 3.5 admin guide are available on this page: https://documentation.sas.com/download?softwareId=administration&softwareVersion=3.5   From this page, you can select the chapters that you are interested in and download them as a zip file. Extract them to a folder and you can use standard PDF viewers to search across the files and find the topics of interest.    Please note, when you download you will have the latest information. But these PDFs are frequently updated and you should regularly refresh your downloads to stay up to date.   Also, note that you cannot manipulate these files (edit or merge) as they are locked and password protected. I'm talking to SAS' legal team to see if we can lift that restriction, as I'm sure that you'd like to combine PDFs into aggregate books that meet your needs. I'll post again when I have an update.   I really hope you get some value out of this function. I would love to hear any feedback. ... View more

This article was rewritten Feb 20th 2023 to reflect some product name changes, to update screen captures, and to accurately reflect the latest SAS Help Center enhancements.   I am part of the team that writes the documentation for SAS. I wanted to give you a few useful tips for getting the most out of the documentation.   Where to find the documentation This page provides links to the most popular SAS documentation and a mechanism for searching. Of course, you can access the documentation from the software. The link normally looks something like this:  Entering the SAS Help Center from the software has a couple of advantages:  You always come to the appropriate version of the software. Your entry point is a carefully crafted landing page that will guide you as to the scope and content of the documentation that you have loaded.    Searching OK, so you’re in the documentation—what now? Those tables of contents can be long. How are you going to find what you need? One recommendation is to use the Search function. Let’s use the 2022.09 SAS Viya Platform Administration Guide as an example. If you need information about backups, enter “backup” in the search bar.   You should get 113 results. Here is a partial listing of the results (for this discussion, I have added a few labels in red):   Let’s break down the search hits (A). They are sorted by relevance and represented by the topic title (for example, Backup and Restore: Perform an Ad Hoc Backup), followed by the specific document that contains this search hit. Note that almost all SAS documentation is viewed as collections of more granular documents. In this case, the first few hits are all from the Backup and Restore guide.     But let’s imagine you are trying to perform a migration and want to know how to backup as part of the migration process. This is where the filter area (B) can help you. The filter lists all the guides that make up this collection. Scroll down and select Full-System Migration. This narrows down the hits to just 3, and they are all in the Full-System Migration Guide.    The last thing to note is that if you had not obtained the results that you were looking for, there’s a simple way to broaden the search. Click the link labeled C to search not just the Admin docs, but all SAS documentation for the same term. I use that trick all the time.    Other Useful Features   Changing Languages Generally, the Help Center will honor your browser’s locale settings. The menus of SAS Help Center should be in your preferred language, and the content will be displayed in your language unless it has not been translated, in which case it will default back to English.   However, note that if you follow a hyperlink that includes a locale, for example: https://documentation.sas.com/doc/en/sasadmincdc…  this locale will take precedence over your browser preference. If you know the two-character code for your preferred language, you can manually modify the URL.    At the bottom of the Help Center window is the Language selector. Click it to get a list of the languages that the current document is available in. Here is an example from the SAS Studio documentation:  Select the language of your choice. A new tab (or window) opens with the current document in the chosen language, and additionally, the Help Center menus will also be in the chosen language. Within a document collection, the individual documents might not have all been translated into the same languages.    Changing Versions There is also a Version selector that enables you to rapidly switch between versions of the docs. It’s located in the main banner, after the document title. Here is an example from the SAS Viya Platform Administration guide:    Click the version that you want to use. The content reloads for the chosen version. Note that if you access a page that corresponds to a version that is no longer fully supported you get a warning message: Follow the link to go to the most up-to-date version of that page, or use the version selector to make your own choice. To reiterate, if you use the Help Center link in your software, you always land in the corresponding version of the documentation.    Thanks for reading. I hope this article helps you get the most out of SAS documentation. I would love to hear your feedback. ... View more