Is your analytics platform feeling … possessed?

By Carrie Foreman, Managed Services Manager

It’s 3am. Nobody’s logged in. And yet something in your analytics platform is very, very busy.

You know that feeling when your analytics platform starts acting… strange? Batch jobs running at ungodly hours. Backups vanishing into thin air. Logs multiplying like cursed gremlins. It’s not just spooky season, it’s the unmistakable sign that your environment might be haunted.

In the cloud, ghosts don’t just haunt. They bill. Whether you have SAS Viya running on Kubernetes, or SAS 9.4 and Posit server sitting on virtual machines in Microsoft Azure, AWS or Google Cloud, every forgotten session, oversized instance and half-empty node quietly ticks up your invoice while you sleep. Now that’s a frightening thought.

But don’t worry. You don’t need garlic, silver bullets, or a priest. You need a platform health check and a team that knows how to handle the supernatural side of systems. So… who you gonna call? …

Katalyze Data.

We’re the ghostbusters of analytics infrastructure—armed with diagnostics, automation, and a healthy dose of tech exorcism. Our mission? To track down and banish the digital ghouls that lurk in your platform’s shadows, whether that’s SAS 9.4, SAS Viya or Posit.

Let’s meet the usual suspects, and where they hide in SAS 9.4, SAS Viya and Posit:

• Zombie Jobs – these undead processes have been running for weeks… months… maybe centuries. On SAS Viya, idle Compute sessions keep their pods alive, so the autoscaler can’t scale down the node. We hunt them down with session audits, then set sensible timeouts and workload rules so nothing rises from the grave again.
• TLS Tombstones – expired certificates that should’ve been buried long ago. Instead, they rise from the grave to break logins, integrations and APIs, and summon cryptic error messages along the way. The rules have also changed. Public certificates are now capped at 200 days (100 from March 2027), and since this summer public certificate authorities no longer issue certificates that can also authenticate clients. Any service that reused one certificate for both jobs in mutual TLS will fail at its next renewal. We map every certificate, check its expiry date, find any used for mutual TLS and schedule renewals before anyone has to say a few words at the graveside.
• Memory Ghouls – these RAM-hungry processes sneak in like haunted-house guests, then never leave. On SAS Viya, CAS is built to use the memory it’s given, which is brilliant until a table loaded “just for a quick test” is still there months later. We review memory across your platform, right-size the limits and set alerts that scream before your users do.
• Disk Gremlins – they start off cute: just a few harmless logs. Then someone feeds them after midnight. Suddenly SAS Work, CAS disk cache, user home directories and log folders are overflowing in a system-wide party. They laugh in the face of your clean-up scripts, so we write better ones and set retention policies that actually stick.
• Backup Banshees – they promise eternal protection… but vanish at dawn. Backups that fail silently, restore points nobody has ever tested and recovery plans that assume a server, or a whole availability zone, will never go down all wail at the worst possible moment. We check that your backups run, that they restore, and that the plan for the day the lights go out is written down.
• Ghosts of Releases Past – software that has outstayed its welcome. The Kubernetes community retired ingress-nginx in March 2026, so there are no more fixes or security patches, and SAS Viya now supports Contour instead. We map every component against its support dates and plan upgrades on your terms, not an attacker’s.

Whether you run SAS 9.4, SAS Viya or Posit, in the cloud or on-premises, our platform health check scans your servers, nodes, storage and certificates for hidden threats, clears out the undead with automated clean-up routines and sets smart alerts to prevent future hauntings.

It isn’t a one-off scare, either. Our Managed Services include regular platform health checks of performance, stability, usage and available updates, with a dedicated technical account manager who knows your environment and our own monitoring tools to spot trouble early. And yes, we bring the holy water. (Metaphorically. Mostly.)

At Katalyze Data, we specialise in SAS and Posit platform hygiene, cloud infrastructure optimisation and performance tuning. We’ve seen it all, and we’ve banished it all. And it doesn’t stop there, if those ghoulish bugs only come out at night, our 24/7 support service ensures they have no place to hide. If your logs are whispering in the dark, your certificates have gone to the great CA in the sky or your backups vanish with the sunrise, it’s time to call in the experts.

So, you gonna call? Get in touch with the Katalyze Data team to book your platform health check and find out which of these suspects are lurking in your environment. We’ll bring the tools. You bring the cluster.

We ain’t afraid of no ghosts.