The Report Center, available since SAS 9.4M3, is a collection of stored processes that produce reports from data in the SAS Environment Manager Data Mart. These reports are a window into the performance and status of your SAS environment and its resources. They're samples of the types of reports you can produce using available metric data. You can also create your own reports to meet your individual requirements.

How Report Center works

The stored processes in the Report Center are created when you initialize SAS Environment Manager Extended Monitoring. However, the stored processes operate only on data that was stored in the SAS Environment Manager Data Mart by the APM or ACM ETL processes. Unless you initialize and enable one of those packages, no reports are produced.

The information in SAS Environment Manager Data Mart is the storage area for the Audit Performance Metrics (APM) and Agent Collected Metrics (ACM). APM scans the components in your SAS system for SAS server logs, SAS job logs, SAS Metadata and HTTP access logs; basically, everything SAS. The ACM collects information such as workload, CPU usage, and memory.

The current SAS Administration Fast Track course, which includes information about the Report Center, is taught on SAS 9.4M6. Before I decided to write this post, I searched and found others have provided information about the Report Center. There are several other blog posts and videos about it, so it surprises me how many I teach are unaware of the Report Center.

After generating reports in class, I have a whole new band of converts for the SAS Report Center. The great news is that it is never too late to initialize the Report Center in your SAS 9 environment.

Students in my classes often want to know about how to discover what's going on in their SAS environment. They get auditing questions from others in their organizations and don’t know how to find the answers. I honestly get a bit giddy when I can point them to SAS® software's Report Center, so it seems fitting to tout it now, as Friday is System Administrator Appreciation Day.

Learn more about how to use the Report Center in the SAS Environment manager 2.5 User's Guide. Training for the SAS Report Center is found in the SAS® Platform Administration: Fast Track. Happy SysAdmin Day a couple of days early! I look forward to the opportunity to meet you in one of our upcoming classes!