RHCSA Rapid Track

When you register a system with Red Hat Insights, it immediately sends metadata about its current configuration to the Red Hat Insights platform. After registration, the system periodically updates the metadata that it provides to Red Hat Insights. The system sends the metadata with TLS encryption to protect it in transit.

The Red Hat Insights platform analyzes the received data, and displays the result on the https://console.redhat.com/insights site.

Figure 1.7: Insights high-level architecture

Insights is included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 as part of the subscription. Earlier versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers require installing the insights-client package on the system. The insights-client package replaced the redhat-access-insights package starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5. The following section provides a detailed orientation to install the insights-client package and to register your system to Red Hat Insights.

The Insights client periodically updates the metadata that is provided to Insights. Use the insights-client command to refresh the client's metadata.

[root@host ~]# insights-client
Starting to collect Insights data for host.example.com
Uploading Insights data.
Successfully uploaded report from host.example.com to account 1460291.
View details about this system on console.redhat.com:
https://console.redhat.com/insights/inventory/dc480efd-4782-417e-a496-cb33e23642f0

Registering a RHEL server to Red Hat Insights is a quick task.

Interactively register the system with the Red Hat Subscription Management service.

[root@host ~]# subscription-manager register --auto-attach

Ensure that the insights-client package is installed on your system. The package is installed by default on RHEL 8 and later systems.

[root@host ~]# dnf install insights-client

Use the insights-client --register command to register the system with the Insights service and to upload initial system metadata.

[root@host ~]# insights-client --register

On Red Hat Insights (https://console.redhat.com/insights), ensure that you are logged in and that the system is visible under the Inventory section of the web UI.

Figure 1.8: Insights inventory on the Cloud Portal

The Advisor service reports configuration issues that impact your systems. You can access the service from the Advisor → Recommendations menu.

Figure 1.9: Recommendations from the Advisor Service

For each issue, Red Hat Insights provides information to help you to understand the problem, prioritize work to address it, determine what mitigation or remediation is available, and automate resolution with an Ansible Playbook. Red Hat Insights also provides links to Knowledgebase articles on the Customer Portal.

Figure 1.10: Details of an issue

The Advisor service evaluates in two categories the risk that an issue presents to your system:

The Vulnerability service reports common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) that impact your systems. You access the service from the Vulnerability → CVEs menu.

Figure 1.11: Report from the Vulnerability service

For each CVE, Insights provides additional information and lists the exposed systems. You can click the Remediate button to create an Ansible Playbook for remediation.

Figure 1.12: Details of a CVE

The Compliance service analyzes your systems and reports their compliance level to an OpenSCAP policy. The OpenSCAP project implements tools to verify the compliance of a system against a set of rules. Red Hat 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 that apply to your systems. It can also generate an Ansible Playbook, which you can run to update the relevant RPM packages for the applicable advisories. To access the list of advisories for a specific system, use the Patch → Systems menu. Click the Apply all applicable advisories button to generate the Ansible Playbook for a system.

Figure 1.13: Patching a system

With the Drift service, you can compare systems, or obtain a system history. You can use this service for troubleshooting, by comparing a system to a similar system, or to a previous system state. You can access the service from the Drift → Comparison menu.

The following figure shows that you can use Red Hat Insights to compare the same system at two different times:

Figure 1.14: Comparing system history

By using the Policies service, you can create rules to monitor your systems and send alerts when a system does not comply with your rules. Red Hat Insights evaluates the rules every time that a system synchronizes its metadata. You can access the Policies service from the Policies menu.

Figure 1.15: Details of a custom rule

The Inventory page provides a list of the systems that you 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.

By using the Subscription page, you can monitor your Red Hat subscription usage.