Streamlining IT security operations with Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Satellite

In this article, we explore what Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Satellite have to offer individually, and then we will look at how you can have a heightened experience of the two products with the use of Cloud Connector. We then evaluate both offerings by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of the tools for a better understanding of how they compare.

Insights and Satellite are frequently used by customers for a myriad of use cases — some similar and some vastly different — including managing their IT estate. Ultimately, customers are able to proactively streamline the security posture of their IT estate with both or either of these products.

Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Satellite overview

Insights is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, available through the Hybrid Cloud Console with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Satellite subscription. Insights continuously analyzes platforms and applications to predict risk and recommend actions. This aids in the more effective management of your hybrid cloud environments overall.

Figure 1: Insights dashboard on Hybrid Cloud Console

Insights gathers configuration and utilization data on an ongoing basis, then analyzes and provides insights from that data via the web UI, API or integrations through notifications or webhooks. Insights gives you a Red Hat view of how you should prioritize taking action, when and where needed, based on our unique experience in supporting Red Hat products.

With a holistic view of your IT estate in mind, how does an organization manage its IT environment? It is important for customers to have a systematic way to manage their infrastructure. Without standard processes, their organization could at best have inefficiencies, and at worst be open to all kinds of security breaches, compliance issues and audit difficulties.

In relation to scalability, Satellite automates workflow and streamlines content management. This can make administrators much more efficient, giving them more time to work on strategic initiatives rather than spending all day on tedious, manual and error-prone tasks. Other advantages of Satellite include that it provides lifecycle management across your Red Hat infrastructure, that it streamlines your content management and that it is able to scale.

Introducing Cloud Connector

Satellite can work with Insights for the advanced remediation of issues through the use of Cloud Connector. Cloud Connector ties the technologies together so that you can find issues with Insights and fix them with Satellite at scale.

Figure 2: Insights and Satellite (with Cloud Connector) enables push-button remediation of issues identified by Insights

The connected experience between Insights and Satellite is illustrated in Figure 2. All of the data collected on Insights is automatically proxied through Satellite without you having to do any manual configuration. Configuring Cloud Connector enables the “Execute Remediation” button inside of the Insights Remediations service.

Figure 3: Remediations service on Insights console

It really is as simple as clicking a button and running the playbook and having the issue fixed in a matter of minutes. 

Our goal at Red Hat is to do what we can to help you solve your business needs and keep your organization performing at its best. With this in mind, Insights is able to help detect and address IT security issues beyond patching, compliance, performance and availability as well as consistency issues; all of these can result in reduced efficiency and increased costs.

Satellite will help detect and address problems such as the remediation of issues, lifecycle and content management, provisioning and patching at scale across your entire environment.

Feature comparison

Here's a comparison of Insights and Satellite features. This is not an all-encompassing list, but provides key functionality comparisons in different focus areas.

Focus area: Vulnerability

Focus area: Compliance

Focus area: Patching

Focus area: Remediations

To summarize, Red Hat Insights and Red Hat  Satellite can help you to achieve your organization’s overall security goals. Combining Insights and Satellite through the use of Cloud Connector allows you to unlock a connected experience when managing your environment.

Learn more

• Red Hat Insights: Predictive analytics for Red Hat Enterprise Linux

• Automation analytics and Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

• Save administrator time and effort by activating Red Hat Insights

• Boost Red Hat Enterprise Linux efficiency with Red Hat Insights

• Red Hat Satellite: How to obtain Insights Advisor recommendations