Monitoring SAS® through the Web
Sy Truong, Meta-Xceed Inc., Fremont, CA
| ABSTRACT Monitoring SAS processes and SAS work
space in a mutli-user environment, such as UNIX, is key
in maintaining optimal performance. This paper will
present the SAS Monitor, a tool which captures SAS
resources and uses SAS to analyze and display this
information via a Web browser. SAS Monitor is
useful for SAS/UNIX administrators and informative for
end users since the information can be widely distributed
through an intranet. Even though SAS Monitor has
been tested on Solaris, it can be adapted to other
flavors of UNIX. This paper will explore and explain some
of the techniques used in capturing and publishing SAS
resources on the web. INTRODUCTION Operating the SAS system in a
multi-user environment can be extremely resource
intensive. The key to optimizing the SAS system is to
properly maintain and manage the use of memory, disk and
swap space. Since SAS treats each process and temporary
work space as independent jobs, this poses challenges in
the management of resources when many users work on
multiple SAS processes simultaneously. One of the main
causes of system crashes or slow downs is due to defunct
SAS processes which were terminated ungracefully. A good
way in preventing disastrous down time is to preemptively
monitor how SAS uses computing resources and clean up
unused resources before a problem develops. This paper
will demonstrate SAS Monitor which is a tool designed to
monitor SAS activity and provides a method for
effectively reviewing and analyzing system resources. PROBLEM DEFINED Have you ever tried to submit a
SAS program and run into the message? FATAL:
UNABLE TO ESTABLISH THE WORK LIBRARY. This is in spite of claims that
your system has more memory to handle such a job. You may
be in the middle of a statistical procedure or a simple
PROC SORT. It could be that you are trying to invoke an
interactive session of SAS and nothing even starts due to
inadequate memory or disk space. There are many reasons
that may be causing these problems. They include:
There are legitimate cases where
system crashes were caused by not having enough computing
resources. However, there are many instances where there
is enough power to get the job done and system crashes
can be avoided. POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS Since SAS is designed to be very
platform independent, there are few tools that monitor
operating specific resources. This poses challenges since
SAS leaves the management of its work space in physical
files left to the operating system. There exists a
utility called "cleanwork" which will remove
work space that does not have an active SAS process. This
works well, but you may not know when there exist work
spaces without associated processes which need cleaning
up. One possible approach with this method is to schedule
the "cleanwork" utility to run periodically. SAS Monitor works well in
conjunction with utilities such as "cleanwork."
It allows you to view the current status of resource
usage before executing the utility. Monitoring work space and other
system resources can be very beneficial in maintaining
optimal performance. There are few tools in the BASE SAS
product which will supply this information. The new IT
Vision may prove to be useful since it goes more in depth
than the SAS Monitor tool in evaluating system resources.
WHY SAS Monitor? There are many utilities which
are built into the UNIX operating system to supply the
necessary information in evaluating system resources.
However, they are usually command line based facilities
and sometimes cryptic for many users. The information
returned may also be coded and may be difficult to
decipher. SAS Monitor captures system resources specific
to SAS and makes it available to users in a friendly Web
browser interface. It presents the information
graphically and textually to effectively communicate
resource usage. It also analyzes the information before
reporting it to assist you in discovering system
anomalies. IMPLEMENTATION SAS Monitor was developed on the
UNIX Solaris 2.4 running SAS 6.12. Various SAS/IntrNet
components along with SAS HTML publishing macros were
evaluated during development, especially the Application
Dispatcher since it gave more interactive capabilities.
There were performance barriers, however, since capturing
system resources can take time. In this situation, instead of
implementing SAS/IntrNet, BASE SAS and SAS/GRAPH proved
to be more effective. These batch programs were scheduled
to run every ten minutes via the UNIX cron facility to
capture the most up-to-date system resources. SAS Monitor
was accomplished with customized DATA STEP and SAS/GRAPH
programming to publish the HTML pages to a web browser.
The source code is available in the appendix of this
paper. The questions you may ask in determining whether to develop a web application with interactivity versus batch are:
A factor which contributed to
developing SAS Monitor in a batch mode was that there was
a small number of static pages which needed to be
produced. All the HTML pages could be mapped out ahead of
time. This made it easier to have the HTML pages
generated as an independent process from the user's
interactions. It proved to be much more responsive for
the users since all the drill down linked immediately to
the page which had already been produced. The
disadvantage is that the information is not completely up
to date but since the pages get updated every ten
minutes, it suffices. CONCLUSION Obtaining optimal and consistent performance for the SAS system in a multi-user environment, such as UNIX, requires good system monitoring. There are few tools available for this purpose which are accessible to users. SAS Monitor is a tool which captures this information and disseminates it via the web browser. It takes advantage of UNIX tools and SAS to capture, analyze, and report SAS resources. A batch approach was chosen in the design of this tool since there were a limited and predetermined number of pages which needed to be produced. By making resource information accessible to users and administrators, system crashes may be avoided. SAS is a registered trademark or trademark of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. |