SAS Environment Manager: compatible groups save time

Many larger SAS deployments have multiple instances of similar SAS-related servers. For example, a distributed SAS Enterprise BI environment may have several machines running instances of the object spawner or the OLAP server. Similarly, all of your distributed SAS Visual Analytics deployments have worker nodes that are typically dedicated Linux machines that serve only the needs of SAS Visual Analytics users. As a SAS administrator, it is often useful to understand metrics across a collection of these similar resources to keep tabs on the performance of the system as a whole. Fortunately, SAS Environment Manager provides compatible groups as a way to summarize metrics across a collection of similar resources.

To illustrate the usefulness of this feature, let’s suppose that our organization has a distributed SAS Visual Analytics environment with three worker nodes that host all of our in-memory data. Maybe the CEO relies this data to run the company, so we want to keep an eye on these machines as a unit (and make sure the CEO stays happy!). We could, and should, of course, monitor each machine individually for thoroughness, but it is also useful to visualize trends across a collection of similar resources to help spot potential problem areas. Additionally, it saves me time if I can check up on resources in groups of instead of having to dig into each one individually.

Finding a list of compatible groups. So, let’s start by opening SAS Environment Manager. On the Resources page, we can see that there are several predefined compatible groups in our inventory.

Defining a new group. We then select New Group from the Tools Menu and give our group a name, description, and identify what type of resource we intend to group together. In this case, we are going to group three Linux machines that serve as our SAS Visual Analytics nodes.

Selecting specific platforms. The final step is to select the specific Linux platforms from our available inventory. In this case, I have chosen to group these three machines together because I expect the workload for each machine to be relatively uniform.

Monitoring group performance. That’s it. Now we can select our compatible group named VA Nodes and view metrics and performance over time for these three machines as a unit. Because every member of a compatible group is uniform, the metrics collected across the group can be aggregated for reporting purposes. For example, here is a look at the file system read and write operations and the amount of free memory across our three SAS Visual Analytics nodes:

Monitoring individual machines. Examining metrics across the three machines in our group is easy to do as well. Just select one of the metric charts from the Monitoring view, and you can compare the performance of each individual machines across time. In this case, we expect all three machines to display similar performance characteristics and that is confirmed in this graph.

So there you go. Compatible groups can come in handy to investigate and report on the performance of a set of similar resources.

Happy monitoring.

SAS Environment Manager: compatible groups save time was published on SAS Users.