Log entries, Events, Performance Measures, and SLAs: Understanding and Managing your SAS® Deployment by Leveraging the SAS® Environment Manager Data Mart

SAS Environment Manager is included within the release of SAS 9.4. This exciting new product allows administrators to monitor the performance and operation of their SAS deployments. What very few people are aware of is that the data collected by SAS Environment Manager is stored in a centralized data mart that is designed to help administrators to better understand the behavior and performance of the components of their SAS solution stack. This data mart can also be used to help organizations meet their IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) reporting and measurement requirements. In addition to the information about alerts, events and performance metrics collected by the SAS Environment Manager agent technology, this data mart includes the metadata audit and content usage data previously only available from the SAS Audit and Performance Measurement (APM) package. INTRODUCTION Introduced with the SAS 9.4 Intelligence Platform release, SAS Environment Manager provides a framework for SAS administrators and IT operations staff to monitor the performance, health, and operation of their SAS deployment. Designed by SAS for SAS, SAS Environment Manager provides an integrated set of agent and server-based capabilities that are aware of SAS processes and are designed to monitor the status of a SAS deployment’s servers, services, and web applications. These capabilities can help IT organizations in establishing the deployment’s operational norms and service levels. As a documented part of the ITIL best practices, the establishment of customer service levels and resource consumption baselines are critical to maintaining the operationally health and stability of a software deployment. By providing essential information about the usage of their IT resources, SAS Environment Manager can assist IT departments in providing a stable, yet scalable SAS deployment for both the current and future needs of their organization. The SAS Environment Manager framework and kit enablement package is a valuable enhancement to the SAS Environment Manager. It extends the capabilities of SAS Environment Manager beyond the near real-time monitoring capabilities surfaced in the SAS Environment Manager web application user interface. At the center of these expanded capabilities is the SAS Environment Manager Data Mart. This is a specialized data store designed specifically to drive the reporting and analysis of the data that SAS Environment Manager collects. To facilitate this work, the data mart stores detailed data for a longer period of time than the SAS Environment Manager web application. It addition, it provides a fuller context by combining the standard SAS Environment Manager agentcollected metric information with information extracted from the log files generated by the various servers, solutions and web applications of a SAS deployment. This data is made available in a set of out-of-the-box reports and a set of reporting tools. However, organizations are not limited to this set of tools. The data mart enables the full range of analysis capabilities provided by the SAS Intelligence Platform to be applied to the collected data. THE IT INFRASTRUCTURE LIBRARY The IT Infrastructure Library is a set of well-established practices for IT service management that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of the business. At their core, ITIL's five guidelines map the IT service life-cycle, beginning with the identification of customer needs, through design and implementation of the service into operational best practices and finally, to the monitoring of customer focused services based on mutually established service level agreements. At the heart of the ITIL services management framework are three key management objectives:  align IT services with the current and future needs of the business and customers  improve the quality of IT services  reduce the long-term cost of IT services The ITIL service design guidelines encompass process and procedures to assist with delivery and implementation of software, hardware, and services. Rather than focus on a specific area of technology, ITIL service design addresses the processes necessary to successfully stage, test, implement, and support a given hardware or solution.