SAS Viya Workbench

I have used SAS Viya Platform  for almost three years in various ways, including preparing data, using it, generating extracts, and sending them through email to users. We also built an internal dashboard specifically on SAS Viya Platform , and we mainly use it for usage metrics and many other KPIs that users follow. We have developed and shared many dashboards across teams.

We had two main use cases with SAS Viya Platform. The first was direct reporting to users, where we extracted data from SQL Server  as well as Snowflake . We prepared the final report based on SAS Viya Platform using its capabilities and then generated Excel files to send to users' emails. This scenario proved to be very good and efficient in two ways: preparing data and performing many transformations using SAS capabilities, plus sending it in Excel format, which is very rare and difficult to achieve through Power BI, Tableau, or any other reporting tool. We found it critical to use for this purpose. The second scenario involved building reports for users where we used many different types of data sources that were difficult to consolidate in a way that served reporting purposes across various fields. Data came from different sources depending on the nature of the requirements: some from transaction systems, some from data warehousing, and some from portals. We had to consolidate all of these to create analytics and decision-making reports for users. We found this very useful.

It was good in that whatever we needed to prepare, we could prepare it, save it, and use it multiple times. This self-service capability allowed us to develop and prepare data once and then utilize it in multiple reports, which was very beneficial. Where we struggle and where improvement is needed is in how we can make report calculations more feasible for different kinds of calculations. If we can improve there, along with the setting of the UI, placing elements exactly where we want, and utilizing the entire canvas, that would be valuable.

I found it difficult to customize or prepare reports on the reporting side with SAS Viya Platform. Additionally, nowadays there are many AI capabilities that could be built in. I would expect that if those could be integrated into the existing SAS Viya Platform, it would be a really good tool to use.

Any core complex tasks, calculations on-the-fly, and many source integrations needed with SAS Viya Platform are very manageable, and specifically SQL-based tasks can be done through SAS Viya Platform. This can also be shared across with SAS Viya Platform reporting tool. In that way, it is a really good tool.

Many good things stand out about SAS Viya Platform, including that it is a very mature tool, very reliable, and performs very consistently. We rarely experienced failures. The main capability was preparing data coming from various sources, and we were still able to import them, merge them, prepare them, consolidate them, and then prepare reports on top. This was a very rare quality of the platform, as many BI tools struggle to generate data models from various sources. The reports were also very easy to read and develop. One thing I expect more from SAS Viya Platform, specifically on the report side, is how the calculations work. It is not that strong in that sense. It was very difficult to build the required calculations directly on the reporting side. There we sometimes struggled, and when customizing reports, adding filters, or creating and placing charts in a proper way, it required a lot of effort and time. Many settings were not readily available or visible to users or developers so they could easily build them. We struggled a lot there, but overall we face a few issues on the reporting side.

The best feature SAS Viya Platform offers is its engine, which mainly supports data preparation. That is the best thing we have seen so far.

It was very easy in terms of the language with SAS Viya Platform. We had SQL-based capabilities, which are supportive, and we are experts in SQL, so we prefer to write logic in SQL. It supports this in a very good way. There was also capability to build objects that you can read and write anywhere across your data preparation. That was very good, and the speed was excellent.

SAS Viya Platform was very good overall. It is quite comparable to other BI tools we have in the market.

I found SAS Viya Platform quite mature on the security side. We built row-level security, implemented security measures, and it is really easy to make it consistent across users. We found it good.

One thing I expect more from SAS Viya Platform, specifically on the report side, is how the calculations work. It is not that strong in that sense. It was very difficult to build the required calculations directly on the reporting side, and we sometimes struggled. When customizing reports, adding filters, or creating and placing charts in a proper way, it required a lot of effort and time, and many settings were not readily available or visible to users or developers so they could easily build them. We struggled a lot there.

SAS Viya Platform is very good overall. It is quite comparable to other BI tools we have in the market.

Where we struggle and need improvement is on report calculations and how we can make them more feasible for different kinds of calculations. If we can improve there, along with the setting of the UI, placing elements exactly where we want, and utilizing the entire canvas, that would be valuable.

I found it difficult to customize or prepare reports on the reporting side with SAS Viya Platform. Additionally, nowadays there are many AI capabilities that could be built in. I would expect that if those could be integrated into the existing SAS Viya Platform, it would be a really good tool to use.

I have not used much of the AI side of SAS Viya Platform, but I would like to use it. If many things could be added, such as automated calculations, automated charts, or generating many insights and narratives, it would make SAS Viya Platform a great tool.

Two main improvements would transform this into a great tool: improving the UI and calculation capabilities, and merging AI capabilities.

I have used SAS Viya Platform for almost three years in various ways, including preparing data, using it, generating extracts, and sending them through email to users.

SAS Viya Platform is good, scalable, and stable. We did not find issues with that.

SAS Viya Platform is good, scalable, and stable. We did not find issues with that.

Customer support for SAS Viya Platform is adequate. If we go with public support, it is difficult to find because the community is not that strong. However, if we go with specific support directly from SAS Viya Platform customer support, it is available. We have been connecting with SAS Viya Platform because the community on the public platform is not that supportive. Customer support we receive is timely, so we are satisfied with that. It totally depends on how mature the tool is and how many developers are using it. That creates the community and makes it very good for other developers. That way, we do not have to reach out to customer care every time; we can directly get support from the public itself. Normally, with any tool, that is the key success factor, where many users start using the tool and then they support it based on their knowledge and share it.

We did evaluate other options before choosing SAS Viya Platform. Tableau and Power BI were among them. We were not satisfied with those options, which is why we chose SAS Viya Platform.

Building the UI is also not that difficult. If you compare it with Tableau, it requires a lot of effort and expertise to build a good UI. Here , you can create a good UI by default within one or two days. Whatever UI is required, you can make it within one or two days, but with Tableau, it is very difficult. Even expert engineers require a lot of time to build that.

For SAS Viya Platform, I would say there is time savings because many integrations require a lot of effort, time, and many engineers. Here , we can make it in a very easy way.

I am not much aware of the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of SAS Viya Platform because that was handled by the administrator. However, I do not think it is too costly to use. I never did a comparison between other market tools such as Tableau or Power BI with SAS Viya Platform, so I do not have much clarity on that.

Tableau and Power BI were among the options we evaluated. We were not satisfied with those options, which is why we chose SAS Viya Platform.

Our company is very large, so we use multiple tools. We are using Tableau and Power BI in parallel, and based on the use cases, we switch to SAS Viya Platform. Wherever we feel it is really good and where we can build and deliver to users in an efficient, easy, and fast way, we use SAS Viya Platform. However, in our company, which is very large, we use many tools.

SAS Viya Platform is good overall. Two main improvements would transform this into a great tool: improving the UI and calculation capabilities, and merging AI capabilities. I would rate this product seven out of ten.

SAS Viya Platform  has two main use cases in my organization. The first is SAS Visual Investigator for creating fraud alerts, and the second is SAS Visual Analytics  for creating reports and dashboards.

In my use case for SAS Viya Platform , I employ two methods: batch scoring alerts and real-time alerts. In batch scoring alerts, I use the SAS BI  tool from the 9.4 SAS application, which generates and scores for the alert and threshold. Based on the threshold, I create and push this alert to SAS Viya Platform via an indexing job using PROC HTTP, and then the investigator uses it. In the case of real-time alerts, they go directly via the SAS ESP product and use other tools such as Kafka.

The best features SAS Viya Platform offers are in-memory processing, as SAS Viya operates in a CAS environment, so all data processing happens in-memory instead of on-disk as in SAS 9.4. Additionally, it combines various features into one platform; I can use SAS Viya Platform for SAS Visual Analytics for creating reports and dashboards, for SAS Visual Investigator for creating customized investigation dashboards for alerts, and SAS Studio for manual code.

SAS Viya Platform brought several positive outcomes to my project. The first is the centralized investigation platform. Before SAS Visual Investigator, fraud alerts and case tracking were fragmented, so SAS Viya provided investigators with a single unified interface to view alerts, track cases, and document findings. The second is real-time fraud detection; with SAS ESP integrated into Viya, we moved beyond purely batch-based detections, so Kafka streams are now scored in real time, meaning higher risk claims can be flagged. Another outcome is improved reporting via SAS Visual Analytics, and lastly, we can scale for larger businesses.

Based on my implementation, I see a few clear areas where SAS Viya Platform could be improved. The first is a PROC EXP entity analytical gap; my biggest pain point currently is that SAS 9.4 has no direct equivalent in Viya. For social networking and graph analysis, which is critical for detecting connected fraud rings, I am forced to keep SAS 9.4 running. Native  graph analytical capability in Viya could significantly improve my team's performance. The second is upgrade complexity; the upgrade process is very involved. In my case, I cannot jump directly to the target release; I need to go to the intermediate release due to dependencies such as version compatibility on the deployment node. A smoother and more automated upgrade path would reduce the risk and efforts. Lastly, certificate and infrastructure management is an issue; my upgrade was partly triggered by an expiring certificate on the Viya environment. Better built-in certificate lifecycle visibility and alerting would help.

On the integration side, the PROC HTTP-based indexing is fragile. Currently, I push alerts from SAS BI into SAS Visual Investigator using PROC HTTP indexing jobs, which is low-level and any payload structure change can break the integration. A more robust and configurable connector between BI and VI would reduce maintenance load. I would also state that Kafka-ESP integration needs more visibility, and there is no tight loop between VI and upstream data systems. When an investigator closes a case or marks a claim as confirmed fraud in VI, that feedback does not automatically flow back into the scoring models. A closed-loop integration where adjudicated outcomes feed back into the model would significantly improve detection accuracy over time. Regarding the user interface, Visual Investigator customization is limited; tailoring VI alert layouts, case workflows, and fields to match my specific insurance domain would have been achievable with more flexible no-code customization. I find that Visual Analytics and VI are very much siloed, so investigators work in VI while business reporting happens in Visual Analytics. They still feel like separate products rather than a unified suite.

I have been using SAS Viya Platform for the last four years.

In my daily work, I use SAS Visual Investigator to create an alert for fraud claims. Based on that data, if the alert has been raised, it will go to SAS Visual Investigator, and the business people will investigate that and send it.

The shift to real-time detection through SAS ESP has had a noticeable impact on response time. Previously, the entire pipeline was batch-based; the source data came in via the pipeline, landed in SQL servers, and then the VI process happened, meaning frequently a claim could have been flagged after the batch cycle completed. With SAS ESP consuming Kafka streams, suspicious claims are now scored as the data arrives, so alerts reach SAS Visual Investigator within seconds or minutes of the event occurring. The practical impacts are that investigators can act on a claim before it is processed or paid out rather than after, and the high-risk real-time alerts are prioritized separately. It has reduced the time window in which fraudulent claims could slip through undetected.

My implementation uses traditionally the library-based access rather than CAS in-memory processing. The data volumes and architecture of my project were already handled through SAS 9.4, so pipelining and feeding into Viya meant that the in-memory process was leveraged only for SAS Viya Platform users, not the data processing team.

SAS Viya Platform provides built-in AI and machine learning capabilities through the Model Studio for building and training models and Model Manager for deployment, supporting automated machine learning. However, in my project, the models were largely pre-built, and my exposure is more on the pipeline and deployment side rather than model building itself. Regarding governance in SAS Viya Platform, I believe Model Manager provides a central repository to track model versions. Models go through defined promotion workflows and then audit. In my project context, this is important because any change in the scoring model directly impacts the fraud alert generation. From a security and data privacy perspective, I believe Viya uses a role-based access control system where users only see data and the relevant reports based on their role. Integration with LDAP and Active Directory for centralized authentication also helps. The data in Viya can be governed through column-level and even row-level security, which is critical for sensitive data. SAS also supports data masking to protect sensitive fields from being exposed.

In my project, the AI or scoring capabilities of SAS Viya Platform largely meet expectations, but with some important context. It meets expectations concerning batch scoring, where the data for claim data produces consistent and reliably repeatable results. The real-time alerts also meet expectations, as the business rule based scoring in real-time for high-confidence, rule-driven fraud patterns. However, where expectations are only partially met is the rule-based versus true AI; my project is largely based on business rules rather than ML-driven, meaning it only catches known patterns. Evolving or emerging fraud behaviors that a trained model would catch are not captured, and there is no feedback loop.

I rate myself a six out of ten on SAS Viya Platform. What justifies this rating is the hands-on experience, VI, real work on SAS ESP, and the SAS Viya Platform upgrade. I chose six because I believe in rating based on what I can actually deliver, not just exposure. The reason for the six is what I am confident in; I have production-level hands-on experience. I held back for a higher rating because seven or above means I can independently architect, administer, and troubleshoot any component of Viya, and I am not there yet. I have not worked with CAS in-memory or Viya version 4; my environment is version 3.5, so my knowledge has boundaries around the older release, including areas such as administration and platform security. I would rather give an honest six that I can back up with real examples than claim an eight and struggle to answer the follow-up.

Our main use case for SAS Viya Platform  during that time was to analyze the health and records of people based in Canada. We were conducting analysis based upon that data. We tried to find out who were the people who were struggling, who had health issues, and who had the highest chance of complications and death due to health issues. We were trying to do prediction or predictive analytics using those health numbers.

The way I set up the predictive analytics using SAS Viya Platform  involved using data called health data. We obtained it from the sample data from inside SAS analytics and we then, first of all, cleaned up the data. Then we used a pipeline. We then added in some predictions in there, some decision tree analysis, then we tried to do some more concepts such as finding out what was the best form of the prediction. We used those answers to figure out which one had more accuracy or not.

In my experience, the best feature of SAS Viya Platform is that it is very quick in doing the analysis. It does the job very quickly and very well without any issues. I was able to do multiple analyses at the same time. It was pretty easy to document what the analysis was being done. The difficulty level was not too easy but also not too difficult, so it was in the middle ground for any person to learn analytics.

The speed and documentation of SAS Viya Platform helped me in my coursework because we were having very intense analyses done and we needed to submit a lot of assignments and analyses as quickly as possible. SAS Viya Platform was able to do that. I did not do much collaboration, so I cannot speak to how that would work. Perhaps that is something we can look into.

SAS Viya Platform is deployed in my organization as a public cloud.

SAS Viya Platform has a bit of a learning curve. It was not easy to start with. There was a lot of different information, a lot of different courses, a lot of different learning materials, and many different places to find information. It was very difficult to begin with. Initially, it needed a lot of support from my teachers and instructors to help me and guide me through this entire experience. I thought it was a bit of a letdown. SAS Viya Platform is not something that anybody can start learning from zero. They need to work through a learning curve.

I think it is very important for us to understand how SAS Viya Platform can be improved. The learning materials are very scattered. There are a lot of different learning materials that are very different and jumbled up. It was not easy to follow along. There was a lot of different information. I understand that analytics is a very detailed and deep industry to work into, but I think the platform should be something more easy and more understandable.

I would recommend improving the support resources related to SAS Viya Platform.

I have been using SAS Viya Platform for a year, during which I used it for three to four months.

In my experience, SAS Viya Platform is stable and perfect.

The scalability of SAS Viya Platform is perfect.

Before using SAS Viya Platform, my only solution was using Excel or some basic AI materials, but Excel would be the one that I would use for large numbers. It would not be the best solution, but SAS Viya Platform was able to do a better solution with large numbers.

I cannot speak to return on investment related to SAS Viya Platform because I was using it for free. However, the relevant metrics definitely show time saved because it is able to crunch 50 to 60,000 rows of numbers in a matter of five to ten minutes, which is a huge improvement.

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of SAS Viya Platform was that when we were using it, it was the free version. We did not have to pay anything because this was part of the learning experience. I know that is quite good. However, I did check with Reddit and they indicated that SAS Viya Platform is a pretty expensive program. I cannot speak to the pricing because I did not have to deal with the costs directly.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing SAS Viya Platform. I checked out Reddit and tried to understand what SAS Viya Platform is. I saw that people have considerable concerns about these kinds of tools.

I actually loved working with SAS Viya Platform. I would love to know how I can use this to improve my career and increase my salary. I wonder where I can work and which companies can pay me more money. To be honest, this was my own goal. I was not sure where SAS Viya Platform is being used in Canada or which companies are willing to pay money for those skills. I would love to know more about this, perhaps through events or certifications that I can take to improve myself. Anything of that nature would be really important for me.

When I compared SAS Viya Platform to Excel, I noticed that one hundred percent of what SAS Viya Platform can do, Excel cannot do. Excel could not do all of those predictive analytics. Excel was just a basic initial understanding and SAS Viya Platform was able to do all of those very well.

I rate SAS Viya Platform an eight out of ten because it is an amazing tool, but the tool is not very easy to access and it is not easy to learn unless you have a great learning teacher who can help you out. The learning curve was not easy, and the software is not something you can learn from zero without support and guidance. I would recommend that anyone considering SAS Viya Platform do a really good learning before moving on to use the platform. My overall rating for SAS Viya Platform is eight out of ten.

My main use case for SAS Viya Platform  is developing codes using SAS Studio, scheduling the codes using SAS Environment Manager, and creating dashboards or reports using SAS Visual Analytics  within SAS Viya Platform  in a SAS Drive itself.

A specific example of a project where I used SAS Viya Platform for scheduling and dashboard creation is when I worked on government projects for public sector units like HPCL. In that instance, I utilized Visual Analytics for trend analytics to create line charts, bar charts, and highlight key points. On a daily basis, I schedule jobs in SAS Environment Manager, which includes daily, weekly, and monthly tasks.

My main use case for SAS Viya Platform is focused on developing codes, which is very easy, and running the code is also straightforward with just a click of the run button.

The best features that SAS Viya Platform offers to me are the capabilities for writing code and designing flows in SAS Studio, as well as creating insightful dashboards in SAS Visual Analytics . The drag-and-drop feature is particularly useful since I can create more insightful dashboards just by clicking on the charts, which I find very interesting.

SAS Viya Platform has positively impacted my organization by saving time compared to when we were using SAS 9.4. Previously, with SAS 9.4, we were able to work on only one project at a time, which means if we worked for one hour on one project, that was it. However, with SAS Viya Platform, we can work on two to three projects simultaneously within one hour, which is a significant improvement.

To improve SAS Viya Platform, I would say that SAS 9.4 offered multiple tools for creating programs using SAS Enterprise Guide  and for creating schedulers and libraries using SAS Management Console, while everything in SAS Viya Platform is more integrated and combined.

Among the needed improvements for SAS Viya Platform, the consideration of user interface and possibly performance is essential, as it is a web-based application.

I have been using SAS Viya Platform for the past two and a half years.

SAS Viya Platform actually lets me handle multiple projects at once compared to SAS 9.4.

I do not have any ideas regarding integration features within SAS Viya Platform.

I would rate SAS Viya Platform a nine out of ten. I rate it a nine because for a fresher, the platform might not be entirely intuitive. They need time to understand it, and if they make any mistakes in the production environment, it can adversely impact the project, which is why I took off one point. My overall review rating for SAS Viya Platform is nine out of ten.