OpenShift Insights for OpenShift Cluster Manager

At Summit last year, we announced that Red Hat Insights would be included with your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription.  Insights proactively helps you identify, prioritize, and resolve stability, performance, and security risks - before they become urgent issues. Many customers have taken  advantage of this, with the number of hosts using Insights growing by more than 400% over the past year. Now, Red Hat Insights is available for Red Hat OpenShift 4 customers as a new feature of Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager.

Red Hat Insights enables us to identify existing or potential problems for our customers and provides step-by-step directions on how to resolve a problem. Insights automates the expertise Red Hat has accumulated through our over 20 years of open-source leadership. Specifically, it was built on the realization that 85% of the critical issues our customers experience are caused by issues already reported to Red Hat, resolved, and published for others to be aware of as a knowledge base article on the Red Hat Customer Portal. 

There are thousands of helpful knowledgebase solutions already published on Red Hat Access Portal, but it can be difficult to keep up or know if it is even relevant to your environment. Insights automated way to identify problems in your environment before you encounter them. Red Hat uses this knowledge we have gained from supporting our customers to look at what issues are impacting our customer base and automatically alert customers to changes they should make to avoid problems. 

We have also gained more than five years of Kubernetes experience with our customers since releasing Red Hat OpenShift 3 and by working closely with upstream communities and our partners. We now want to offer this experience to you, our customers, and partners in the same way as we did for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. With the first release of OpenShift 4 we have introduced Remote health monitoring. This feature collects anonymized aggregated information about the health, usage, and size of clusters and reports it to Red Hat using two integrated components: Telemetry and the Insights Operator. Remote Health Monitoring also simplifies the subscription and entitlement process for Red Hat customers and enables the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager service to provide an overview of your clusters and their health and subscription status.

Thanks to Remote health monitoring we understand the needs of our customers better, as well as typical OpenShift environments. The Remote health monitoring information enables Red Hat to improve OpenShift Container Platform and to react more quickly to issues that impact customers.. Between OpenShift 4.2 and 4.4, using Insights reduced the number of failing clusters by more than 50%. 

So what happens in the background? How is Red Hat using this data to improve both the product and support experience? And how can you access the same information? Every single day we process more than one million time series of Prometheus events and metrics plus tens of gigabytes of insights data. We look at more than half a million individual keys that we analyze for existing or potential issues, we help to prevent customers from getting into a failed cluster state and we reduce our support resolution time. The results of these evaluations are available in a form of reports and dashboards to Red Hat experts from various teams which allows them to effectively focus their resources and speed for both the development and support process. 

As of today we introduced Insights Advisor integrated into OpenShift Cluster Manager. It is available on https://cloud.redhat.com/openshift for each cluster in your infrastructure. You are able to see results of our analysis, as well as recommendations on how to prevent potential issues or how to solve existing ones. It gives you an ability to filter the results and sort them by their criticality. Through linked information on the Red Hat Customer Portal you can find out more details about every single firing health check. The interface is giving you a similar experience, such as Insights Advisor for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and it adds up to our portfolio of Smart Management applications on cloud.redhat.com. 

We have prepared a short video on how you can access and interact with the results of Insights analysis of all your clusters: