SAS Admin The Basics – Part 1

By
Shane Miles
October 26, 2016

Hi, all you new and budding SAS administrators.
I thought I would share a few things I have picked up over the years that you may what to add to your tool bag.
Firstly, make yourself a daily checklist.  This will vary depending on your site but here are some basic things to check. Add or subtract things depending on your managers expectations and your users demands.

  1. Check the memory utilisation. Also, you want to look at the last few hours so you can see if it is just a spike or not.
  2. Check the CPU usage. Similar to the memory you want to look for a trend as SAS likes to use lots of CPU.  A good rule of thumb is less than 60% used is ok.
  3. Check all of your disk drives, local and SAN.  There are many caveats here but a good rule of thumb is to have over 20 percent of free space available on each drive.
  4. Check that all of your SAS processes are running, don’t forget LSF if you are using it.
  5. Lastly check that your workspace servers are running. A simple validation test via the management console should do.

Some other things you may want to check.

  • Quotas
  • The number of user sessions
  • SAS User disk utilisation
  • SAS Work disk utilisation
  • AD synchronisation
  • The members of your SAS administrators group
  • SAS specific solutions such as Visual Analytics


Shane’s BIG Tip:  Whatever you include in your daily checklist, automate it, create a report and email it to yourself if you can.

Shane out.

Shane Miles is a certified SAS Administrator who likes blogging about conference food.

You can read all of Shane's other blogs here.

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