Red Hat System Administration I
After completing this section, you should be able to use Red Hat Insights to analyze servers for issues, remediate or resolve them, and confirm the solution worked.
Red Hat Insights is a predictive analytics tool to help you identify and remediate threats to security, performance, availability, and stability on systems in your infrastructure running Red Hat products. Insights is delivered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product, so that you can deploy and scale it quickly with no additional infrastructure requirements. In addition, you can immediately take advantage of the latest recommendations and updates from Red Hat specific to your deployed systems.
Red Hat regularly updates the knowledge base used by Insights, based on common support risks, security vulnerabilities, known-bad configurations, and other issues identified by Red Hat. Actions to mitigate or remediate these issues are validated and verified by Red Hat. This support allows you to proactively identify, prioritize, and resolve issues before they become a larger problem.
For each detected issue, Insights provides estimates of the risk presented and recommendations on how to mitigate or remediate the problem. These recommendations may provide materials such as Ansible Playbooks or human-readable step-by-step instructions to help you resolve the issue.
Insights tailors recommendations to each system registered to the service.
You install each client system with an agent that collects metadata about the runtime configuration of the system.
This data is a subset of what you might provide to Red Hat Support using the sosreport command in order to resolve a support ticket.
You can limit or obfuscate the data that your clients send.
This blocks some of the analytic rules from operating, depending on what you limit.
Almost immediately after you register a server and it completes the initial system metadata synchronization, you should be able to see your server and any recommendations for it in the Insights console in Red Hat Cloud Portal.
Insights currently provides predictive analytics and recommendations for these Red Hat products:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 and later
Red Hat Virtualization 4 and later
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
Red Hat OpenStack Platform 7 and later
When you register a system with Insights, it immediately sends metadata about its current configuration to the Insights platform. After registration, the system periodically updates the metadata provided to Insights. The system sends the metadata using TLS encryption to protect it in transit.
When Insights receives the data, it analyses it and displays the result on the Insights web console at https://cloud.redhat.com/insights.
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Insights is included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 as part of the subscription. Earlier versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers require installing the insights-client package on the system.
Important
The insights-client package replaces the redhat-access-insights package starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5.
If your system is registered for software entitlements through the Customer Portal Subscription Management service, you can activate Insights with one command.
Use the insights-client --register command to register the system.
[root@host ~]#insights-client --register
The Insights client periodically updates the metadata provided to Insights.
Use the insights-client command to refresh the client's metadata at any time.
[root@host ~]#insights-clientStarting to collect Insights data for host.example.com Uploading Insights data. Successfully uploaded report for host.example.com. View details about this system on cloud.redhat.com: https://cloud.redhat.com/insights/inventory/dc480efd-4782-417e-a496-cb33e23642f0
Registering a RHEL System with Insights
To register a RHEL server to Insights, the process is as follows:
Interactively register the system with the Red Hat Subscription Management service.
[root@host ~]#subscription-manager register --auto-attachMake sure that the insights-client package is installed on the system. In RHEL 7, this package is in the
rhel-7-server-rpmschannel.Note
This step is not required on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 systems.
[root@host ~]#yum install insights-clientUse the
insights-client --registercommand to register the system with the Insights service and upload initial system metadata.[root@host ~]#insights-client --registerConfirm that the system is visible under Inventory in the Insights web console at https://cloud.redhat.com/insights.
Figure 16.35: Insights Inventory on the Cloud Portal
Insights provides a family of services that you access through the web console at https://cloud.redhat.com/insights.
The Advisor service reports configuration issues that impact your systems. You access the service from the → menu.
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For each issue, Insights provides additional information to help you understand the problem, prioritize work to address it, determine what mitigation or remediation is available, and automate resolution with an Ansible Playbook. Insights also provides links to Knowledgebase articles on the Customer Portal.
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The Advisor service evaluates the risk that an issue presents to your system in two categories.
- Total risk
Indicates the impact of the issue on your system.
- Risk of change
Indicates the impact of the remediation action to your system. For example, you may have to restart the system.
The Vulnerability service reports Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) that impact your systems. You access the service from the → menu.
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For each CVE, Insights provides additional information and lists the exposed systems. You can click to create an Ansible Playbook for remediation.
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The Compliance service analyses your systems and reports their compliance level to an OpenSCAP policy. The OpenSCAP project implements tools to check the compliance of a system against a set of rules. Insights provides the rules to evaluate your systems against different policies, such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
The Patch service lists the Red Hat Product Advisories applicable to your systems. It can also generate an Ansible Playbook that you can run to update the RPM packages associated with the applicable advisories. To access the list of advisories for a specific system, use the → menu. Click for a system to generate the Ansible Playbook.
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Using the Drift service, you can compare systems, or a system history. This service can help you troubleshoot a system by comparing that system to a similar system, or to a previous system state. You access the service from the → menu.
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In the preceding screen capture, Insights compares the same system at two different times.
Using the Policies service, you create rules to monitor your systems and send alerts when a system does not comply with your rules. Insights evaluates the rules every time a system synchronizes its metadata. You access the service from the menu.
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The Inventory page provides a list of the systems you have registered with Red Hat Insights. The Last seen column displays the time of the most recent metadata update for each system. By clicking a system name, you can review its details and directly access the Advisor, Vulnerability, Compliance, and Patch services for that system.
The Remediations page lists all the Ansible Playbooks that you created for remediation. You can download the playbooks from that page.
Using the Subscription Watch page, you can monitor your Red Hat subscription usage.
References
insights-client(8) and insights-client.conf(5) man pages
For more information about Red Hat Insights, refer to the Product Documentation for Red Hat Insights at https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_insights
For more information on excluding data collected by Insights, refer to the Red Hat Insights client data obfuscation and Red Hat Insights client data redaction chapters in the Client Configuration Guide for Red Hat Insights at https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_insights/2020-04/html-single/client_configuration_guide_for_red_hat_insights/index
Information on the data collected by Red Hat Insights is available at System Information Collected by Red Hat Insights
