Hi, all you new and budding SAS administrators.
In SAS Admin The Basics – Part 1 I talked about creating a daily checklist, now we’re going to move on to a Monthly Health Check. It’s a good practice once a month to dive a little deeper into your SAS platform and check to make sure everything is still working OK and that there are no unforeseen issues on the horizon.
Let’s create a Monthly Health Check.
- Check your SAS license, when does it expire?
- Check for any SAS hot fixes.
- Check the growth of your disk drives, compare usage against past months.
- Have a look at the CPU utilisation over the last month, is it consistently over 60%?
- Check the memory usage over the last month, are there periods where it is in high demand?
- Check the usage of your SAS work folder, how often did it full up? Was there a long period where it was over 80% utilised?
- Archive your SAS logs.
- Check and archive other data based on your companies archive policy.
Before you can check all this you will most likely need to put some monitoring in place to capture disk, CPU and memory usage. You will also need an archiving policy and know where all you SAS logs are too, but hey, what else were you going to do today anyway?!
Shane’s BIG tip: Automate what you can, especially number 7 and 8.
Monthly Archive Report
Shane out.
