SAS administrators: Providing maximum benefit

There are people who claim that an IT expert professional with no knowledge of SAS can get the SAS Administrator job done. That's probably true. It also depends on your definition of getting the job done. At some SAS sites, it can be that the administrator's role in supporting SAS is to install it and apply patches, and, if a BI or EBI installation is involved, to also do the metadata administration; but otherwise, the users are on their own.

What can SAS administration and support entail?

Let me describe the real working life of one SAS Administrator, stationed in a business functional area, who had a variety of experience both in SAS application development and in IT infrastructure support. It was an environment where control of the SAS BI server was in the hands of IT. The server was used not only by the SAS Administrator’s departmental colleagues, but also by users throughout the enterprise.

Here is what the job can be like, particularly if you have a bias for maximizing benefit to the SAS users and you believe in attentive support of them and the environment—not simply creating and maintaining the SAS environment.

Platform-oriented support

Serve as the go-to subject matter expert for IT personnel on all day-to-day problems involving the SAS server, including performance, tuning, troubleshooting, gathering and interpretation of diagnostics, and decisions about configuration

Coordinate installation of upgrades, enhancements, and changes to SAS software

Perform testing and quality assurance for all upgrades, enhancements, and changes to SAS software, including new releases, hot fixes, and service packs

Perform SAS testing and SAS quality assurance for any upgrades, enhancements, and changes to non-SAS-software aspects of the hardware, software, and network that affect or involve the SAS server

Coordinate and monitor progress of testing by users and professional programmers

Schedule and coordinate all planned outages on the SAS server

Alert users affected by unplanned outages on the SAS server, notifying them if there is to be an emergency reboot, and keeping them informed as to status and progress during the outages

Review, evaluate, and select all SAS software fixes for relevance

Serve as liaison to SAS Institute on all aspects of the SAS software, licensing, and cost matters

Review and advise on annual renewal of licensing for SAS software portfolio

Develop a monitor to track who is using the SAS server, when, and with what impact on CPU and memory resources

Develop a monitor with email alerts to notify users whenever their SAS process have consumed a threshold amount of CPU time, with follow-up alerts upon further consumption of each threshold increment, with email alert copies to Server Administrator

Develop tools to capture, parse, and analyze SAS-related records from the Windows Event Log

Develop disk space usage reporting for permanent data, with emails to users of shared disks that reach or exceed a threshold

Develop a monitor to detect old data not cleaned up from critical shared disk used for SAS work data sets, sending email alert to owning user, with copy to Server Administrator—if the shared disk fills up, an entire group of users is immediately denied access to SAS

Perform disk space planning and allocate disk space for applications and users support

Administer SAS BI server user access definition and controls

Define the BI server user groups and corresponding logical servers

Design and implement scheduled backups of the metadata database

User-oriented support

Support users of client tools SAS Enterprise Guide and SAS Add-in for Microsoft Office

Support professional programmer users of SAS in Batch

Provide internal SAS consulting for users on matters of how-to, performance, or malfunction

Serve as user liaison/educator for upgrades to the SAS server and SAS client software

Develop, administer, and analyze results from surveys of SAS user satisfaction and SAS user needs

Organize and host internal SAS users meetings for user mutual education and networking

Serve as coordinator for all SAS-provided on-site training

Perform SAS training

Develop tools so that users can monitor, control, and audit their processing

Build and maintain custom macros

Prepare, disseminate, and web-post documentation on SAS facilities and matters of interest

Design, create, and maintain a web-based User Documentation and Tools environment for access to local documentation and resources, as well as those hosted at SAS or elsewhere on the internet

Provide web-based guidance to users so that they can get immediate phone help from or submit problems to SAS Technical Support when the SAS Admin is unavailable

Data-oriented support

Support all SAS-server-hosted data, regardless of type

Define and administer Windows security to control access to SAS-server-hosted data

Implement routine downloads to the SAS analytical database from enterprise-internal production non-SAS databases (Oracle, etc.)

Handle ad hoc imports of purchased data in a variety of non-SAS formats (often packaged for provider ease in distribution, but needing work to make it maximally usable for analytics)

Provide documentation, code samples, and assistance for users who access data from non-SAS sources

SAS administrators: Providing maximum benefit was published on SAS Users.