Recently, Red Hat announced Red Hat Insights’ inclusion inside Enterprise Linux subscription packages—and diligent users are coming armed with questions. Inside, unpack answers to the top FAQs about Insights best practices.
Red Hat Insights questions get answered
Red Hat Insights is a rules-based analytics solution for Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments that proactively helps identify and remediate threats, avoiding outages and unplanned downtime. When the environment is operating well, the team is free to focus on innovation and higher-value projects. Red Hat Insights is included in active Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions for versions 6.4 and higher, whether you have deployed on-premises, as a virtual environment, or on the public or private cloud.
The analytics and remediation guidance within Insights are based on more than 1,000 rules. These rules scan for specific conditions in the areas of performance, scalability, availability, and security. Because it is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, Insights is continually updated to include new rules and features to make Red Hat Enterprise Linux administration even easier.
Use Red Hat Insights in three easy steps:
- Register the Insights client on Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts and cloud instances.
- Review potential issues that Insights found at cloud.redhat.com.
- Remediate issues with provided guidance.
Question: Will Insights be included with all Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions?
Answer: As of May 2019, Insights is part of active Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions for versions 6.4 and higher. This includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 8 and 8.1. If you use Red Hat Enterprise Linux from a cloud provider, you can still use Insights, but you must set up a portal ID at access.redhat.com. The embedded versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will not include Insights. See complete details on the supported versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Question: Where do I access Insights?
Answer: If you are a new user, go to the Get started page for guidance on registering the Insights client for your Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments. The Insights dashboard is used to review and remediate risks that Insights has identified once you enable the Insights client. This dashboard is hosted on cloud.redhat.com. Existing Insights users who already have registered their Insights clients can proceed directly to this analytics dashboard to view the risks Insights has identified.
Question: What types of risks do Insights identify?
Answer: Insights proactively identifies security, performance, availability, and stability issues. It uses more than 1,000 (and growing) rules derived from Red Hat’s extensive and unique experience in supporting clients. It is the only solution to provide remediation guidance for each issue and to integrate with other Red Hat products such as Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform and Red Hat Satellite to complete the remediation.
Question: What are the main steps for using Insights?
Answer: The Insights client is provided for Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 6.4 and above. The process generally is:
- Register your hosts or environments.
- Review the analytics results on the Insights dashboard on cloud.redhat.com.
- Remediate issues using the provided guidance.
Question: What is the design principle behind data collection in Insights?
Answer: The design principle is simple: Collect only the minimum data needed for analysis and issue identification, where the focus is on identifying potential issues in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment. Complete volumes of system information such as core dumps or full log files are avoided. Insights, by default, does not collect personal information. The data collected for analysis is typically a fraction of what you might need to send to resolve a support issue. Examples of information that may be collected include a line of a log file matching a rule, host configuration metadata, and runtime information. Before sending, you have the option to inspect and redact the data that Insights collect.
Question: How is remediation handled, and can I use Ansible?
Answer: For each issue identified, Insights includes remediation guidance that explains how to resolve it, saving you research time. Identified issues may include an Ansible Playbook that you can optionally execute, or you can create your own Ansible Playbook. You also have the option to manually resolve an issue. Each issue includes a link to a Red Hat Knowledgebase article that explains the issue and includes other details. Only Insights takes advantage of Red Hat’s extensive Red Hat Enterprise Linux knowledge with remediation guidance, targeting it when and where it is needed so that you know where to focus attention.
Question: Does Insights work with Red Hat Satellite?
Answer: Yes. Insights can be used from within Red Hat Satellite, providing ease of use for Satellite users.
Question: Does Insights work with cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux?
Answer: Cloud management services offer industry compliance visibility, common vulnerabilities and exposure (CVE) checking, and drift analysis functions that extend management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments. If you already have enabled the Insights client, cloud management services are a simple solution to adopt.
Source: Red Hat