Here are four tips to remember when you contact SAS Technical Support for assistance. These tips help make your support experience run smoothly and enable us to assist you as quickly and efficiently as possible. You can contact SAS Technical Support by clicking here. If you are located outside the U.S., visit our international contact page to find the contact information for your local SAS office.

Tip #1: Always describe your environment

All inquiries to SAS Technical Support should include basic information to help us understand your environment. Please include the following:

• The SAS products that you use, with product names completely spelled out rather than acronyms.
• The versions of the SAS products that you use. To obtain this information, you might need to follow the instructions in SAS KB0036131, "Using the ViewRegistry Report and other methods to determine software releases and hot fixes that are installed."
• The operating system on your computer. If you need assistance, see SAS Note 37314, "How to determine which Windows operating system you are currently running." If you use UNIX, run the following:

• Is this a production environment?
• The operating system on your SAS server computer (if applicable).
• The site number that is associated with your SAS software. Follow the instructions on the Locating Your SAS Site Number page. You can also find your site number by opening a SAS session and submitting the following code:

Your site number is listed at the top of the output in your SAS log. Sometimes, you can find the site number by clicking Help ► About. 

• The order that was used to install your SAS software (if known).

Tip #2: Be as detailed as possible when you describe your issue

Technical Support defines a "problem" as a "situation in which an expected level of performance is not being achieved." If you encounter a problem, start by answering the question "What is wrong with what?" The answer to this question is a good statement to use as the subject of your submission. Here are several examples: "New user cannot log on to SAS Enterprise Guide" or "PROC SQL generates error message xxxx."

Provide details that will help us understand the specifics of the problem. Consider providing answers to these questions:

• What do you see that indicates that there is a problem?
• What were you expecting to happen?
• When does the problem occur (what do you do to create the problem)?
• Did it ever work as expected?
• How often does the problem occur?
• Who is it happening to? For example, is it restricted to certain user IDs or to certain workstations?
• When did the problem first occur?
• Is this a performance-related issue? That is, does your SAS log show much higher values for Real time than for CPU time? If so, please add this block of statements to the top of your program file and run the SAS process again:

Save the SAS log to a file and send it as an attachment.

Tip #3: Attach supporting documentation

• If you are presented with an error message, send the entire SAS log that includes the error message.
• If you are presented with an error dialog box that directs you to a log file for additional details, send the referenced log. This is very common during software installations.
• If you encounter a problem with the behavior of a software product, create a screen capture of the condition.
• For instructions about uploading files, see SAS KB0036136, "How to upload and download files using the SASTSDrive file sharing server."
• If the version of SAS that you have runs on Kubernetes (also known as the SAS^® Viya^® platform), refer to SAS KB0038941, "SAS^® Viya^® for Kubernetes Diagnostic Documentation." The get-k8s-info script output should be provided when scenarios outlined in the KB article occur.

Tip #4: Describe any steps that you have taken to resolve the problem yourself

If you have already taken steps to resolve the problem on your own, let us know what steps you took and the results. It is often beneficial to know what testing you have already performed so that we can compare your results to the problem, as well as to avoid asking you to repeat steps. Let us know if you have tested on other machines, tested with other code or data, applied hot fixes, or followed instructions from a SAS Note or SAS KB article, for example.

We hope that everything runs smoothly, and you rarely need technical support. However, for those times that you do need to submit a request for assistance to SAS Technical Support, be sure to use the guidelines above to help us serve you better.