Capturing the number of logins per SAS user

Christina Harvey recently forwarded this question from SAS user Bob Wasicak to several administrators here at SAS:

“Does the metadata layer capture the number of login's per user? And how can I get at it?  I have been using the metadata browser but would like to write a query to extract this type of information.”

It’s an interesting question that merits its own blog post, so here’s our combined answer:

Certainly within the metadata server logs with the right options set, it should be possible to obtain the information about how many times a user attempted to connect to the metadata server using via one of SAS’s interfaces.

The SAS Audit, Performance and Measurement (APM) package can provide those numbers in an out-of-the-box report. APM accumulates connection attempts in its artifacts and audit datasets. It reports something similar to what you are requesting in its "MetadataClientLogonUsage" report, but breaks down the login counts on a per-day basis over the last 30 days, and further subdivides by the IP address from which the same user logged in. Since the APM datasets are simple SAS datasets, you could add your own report to simply report total logins over some timespan and since APM includes the source for its reports, you would already have a starting point.

APM is a free download. You can find installation instructions and read more about its features for SAS 9.2 and SAS 9.3 platforms at support.sas.com.

Simon Williams has additional information.  You may find his recent post on audit and traceability useful as well. Although Finding audit bliss in SAS Web Report Studio focuses on one application, the tips and techniques may be applied to other SAS clients.

There are more resources about auditing SAS system usage at these support.sas.com sites.  Other SAS users may have exactly the information you need:

Enterprise Management Integration Focus Area

SAS Deployment Community

Capturing the number of logins per SAS user was published on SAS Users.