Log files contains tons of useful information, they help you when you have syntax errors, warnings and notes but you could use your logs in order to monitor your daily processes and identify the potential bottlenecks.

Every time a job is launched in SAS, a log can be created and stored on your server. When your processes run without errors, logs are just generated and then suppressed couple of days after. Why shouldn't we collect the performance statistics of every step in order to monitor our jobs when the logs are generated? If we see a difference between the successive run date this could indicate potential issues. If we analyze the statistics of every step, we will detect the potential bottlenecks.
In this tips and tricks we will first talk about the log files:

• What kind of information can we find ?
• How can we redirect them to a specific place ?
• How can we name them with timestamp ?

Then, we will see how we could create a SAS program that read the log in order to extract the statistics of every steps and store them in datasets for further usage.

You have some SAS experience would like to create a code which will allows you to check your logs automatically.