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Since announcing the inclusion of Red Hat Insights in all Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscriptions in May 2019, we have continued to evolve Insights and expand its capabilities to help make Red Hat Enterprise Linux the intelligent foundation for workloads across the hybrid cloud. Red Hat Insights is Red Hat’s proactive operations and security risk management offering which makes it easier for IT teams to detect, diagnose and remediate potential problems before they impact production systems or end users. We’ve seen many customers take advantage of this inclusion in RHEL subscriptions, with the number of RHEL instances using Insights to manage operational efficiency and security growing by more than 400% since the beginning of 2019.  

With Red Hat Insights, IT teams have access to an advanced set of operational and security management capabilities that help Red Hat platforms run more smoothly and with reduced security risk. And when you add Red Hat Smart Management with Red Hat Satellite, users gain Insights integration capabilities to detect risks and execute remediation at scale with the push of a button.  

Expanded services address two key use cases
Red Hat Insights is being continually enhanced, and has expanded over the past year to help address risks to operational efficiency, as well as providing more comprehensive visibility into the security and compliance posture of IT systems and applications based on RHEL. 

Operational Efficiency 
To help facilitate more predictable configurations and improved confidence in operations, Insights delivers Red Hat expertise as detailed recommendations with step by step remediation guidance for specific systems or cloud instances. These recommendations cover availability, performance, stability and security-related configuration best practices as well as helping to understand your current patch application status. When risks are pinpointed in advance, users can resolve them more quickly to avoid downtime and interruptions. Insights also includes two new services that help users monitor for adherence to internal policies and understand configuration changes over time. 

Outages can be costly to an organization in terms of revenue, efficiency and customer satisfaction. By operating more confidently right from your Linux foundation, users may be better positioned to meet uptime expectations for the platforms and workloads that stakeholders require. Because Insights pinpoints areas that require focus, fewer system admins can better manage a growing hybrid cloud estate. With included step-by-step remediation guidance provided when and where it is needed, administrators are better able to resolve issues faster and more accurately, and may deepen their Linux skills as they work.   

Security and compliance risk management 
To improve proactive visibility into an organization’s security and compliance posture, Insights now includes compliance and vulnerability analytics services that help identify which Red Hat security advisories and industry Common Vulnerabilities and Exceptions (CVEs) apply to your Red Hat environments, as well as leveraging OpenSCAP to identify instances where systems may be out of compliance with regulatory policies. 

Tools that routinely determine this applicability can help users improve focus on the most important threats across cloud and on-premises environments with less manual effort. At a time when environments are large and highly complex and IT organizations are operating remotely or with limited manpower due to the COVID-19 pandemic, new analytics-driven processes are required to better manage security and compliance risk. 

New services for increased knowledge across environments
Red Hat Insights now refers to a collection of purpose-built services that are available on cloud.redhat.com. This expanded set of services provide Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers with awareness of a variety of potential risks and how to resolve them.
The Advisor service was formerly known as Insights, and has been renamed due to this expansion. Compliance, Vulnerability and Drift (system comparison) services are now included as Red Hat Insights services. In addition, new Policies and Patch services have been added. 

 

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The new features and enhancements that help users better manage their hybrid cloud deployments include:

  • Advisor identifies known configuration risks in the operating system, underlying infrastructure, or workloads that impact performance, stability, availability or security best practices.
  • Vulnerability assesses, remediates and reports on CVEs that impact Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments in the cloud or on-premises.
  • Compliance analyzes the level of compliance of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment to an OpenSCAP policy, based on the Red Hat guide.   
  • Drift compares systems to baselines, system histories and to each other to troubleshoot or identify differences.
  • New: Policies enable organizations to define and monitor for policies that are important internally, with alerts for environments that are not aligned to a policy.
  • New: Patch determines which Red Hat product advisories apply to an organization’s specific Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances. It provides guidance for manual remediation either manually or via Ansible Playbooks for patching.   
  • New: Subscription watch provides unified reporting of Red Hat subscription usage and utilization for better management of subscriptions to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Red Hat OpenShift Platform. For convenience, subscription watch is included in the Insights dashboard.

Remediation at scale with more integration to Red Hat Smart Management 
Red Hat Smart Management now includes a Cloud Connector that enables streamlined remediation of identified risks from within the Insights dashboard. Smart Management continues to include Red Hat Satellite for infrastructure management and remediation of identified risks. Ansible Playbooks you have created within Insights to address specific risks within your inventory can also be executed with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, at your option. 


When you combine Smart Management and Insights, you are better able to pinpoint the risks that matter to your operation, then resolve them at scale. This can help provide the solutions you need to more easily improve operational efficiency and security risk management without manual effort.  

Get started with Red Hat Insights, right from your subscription
If you have a RHEL subscription, Insights is available for your use. Getting started takes three easy steps that require only a few minutes:

  • Install and/or register the Insights client depending on your version of RHEL. Version 8.2 of RHEL includes some capabilities to easily enable at install time through its installation interface1.
  • Review Insights findings on the dashboard.
  • Remediate risks using the provided guidance.

You can also learn more about the new Insights offerings at Red Hat Summit 2020 Virtual Experience on April 28 - 29, 2020. A few recommended sessions include: 

  • Red Hat Management strategy and roadmap  NA / LATAM or EMEA or APAC
  • Manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux the easy way with Red Hat Insights - NA / LATAM or EMEA or APAC
  • Demo of using Red Hat Insights to proactively keep your Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment stable, secure and compliant - NA / LATAM or EMEA
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions: Roadmap and Features - NA / LATAM or EMEA
  • Managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for SQL Server database administrators - NA / LATAM or EMEA

Visit our Red Hat Insights page for full details and getting started information, and visit our Red Hat Smart Management page for additional information.    

 

1RHEL 8.2 allows Insights to be enabled at install time so no post-install configuration is required; RHEL 6 and 7 require installation and registration of the Insights client.

 
 

About the author

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies.


Red Hat helps customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardize on our industry-leading operating system, and automate, secure, and manage complex environments. Award-winning support, training, and consulting services make Red Hat a trusted adviser to the Fortune 500. As a strategic partner to cloud providers, system integrators, application vendors, customers, and open source communities, Red Hat can help organizations prepare for the digital future.

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