Enhance operational efficiency with Red Hat Insights

IT managers face many pressures managing their IT environments. Most of all, they need to deliver operational efficiencies that depend on factors such as security, performance, availability, and stability. 

These managers must deliver this efficiency while balancing available IT resources and skills, in addition to their costs. They must also help move the organization from a reactive mode to one that focuses on innovations that deliver business advantages. These seem like competing pressures, but the right foundation and management solutions—based on Red Hat® technology—can help. 

Linux® is a key platform for running existing applications and new cloud-native innovations, but it must be delivered as a manageable distribution to deliver the full range of benefits. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a popular distribution that helps IT professionals scale and run workloads across bare-metal, virtual, hybrid, and multicloud environments, along with at the edge of a network. To further decrease complexity, subscriptions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux also include several capabilities that deliver Red Hat expertise as a cloud service to help better manage deployments. 

Among those is Red Hat Insights, a suite of hosted services that continuously analyzes Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems to minimize risks and keep systems security-focused, performant, and compliant by identifying potential issues and streamlining remediation. 

Insights uses predictive analytics and deep domain expertise to analyze security, compliance, performance, availability, and stability risks and to determine which Red Hat advisories apply to your implementations. Its capabilities also allow it to analyze Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems running SAP and Microsoft SQL Server workloads, monitor for internal policy alignment, and compare systems to baselines and other systems to help reduce complexity. 

Previously, Red Hat Insights only provided remediation guidance, but with its updated capabilities, you can now resolve identified threats at scale using playbooks that can be launched directly from the Insights console. Larger enterprises or less-connected businesses can use Red Hat Satellite to extend and enhance the remediation capabilities of Insights.

One key objective is keeping your applications running smoothly, because downtime can be costly to your business in terms of lost revenue and lower productivity. Outages and other problems are usually the result of a combination of detailed factors that are difficult to spot. Modern tools add analytics so administrators know when and where to focus attention can help reduce downtime.

For example, an issue may result from a specific configuration setting combined with a specific operating system (OS) version that is running a specific workload. When one administrator is responsible for a large estate, there is not enough time to know every detail. This is where Insights pinpoints potential issues and their impact on your environment and provides step-by-step guidance on how to resolve them— which often includes an automated remediation playbook. With this, your team is in a better position to resolve risks early. When you multiply this single scenario across a large management estate, the operational efficiency benefits from Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Insights become clear.

An additional way to improve operational efficiency is by simplifying the number of different operating environments across your on-premise and cloud infrastructures. 

You can do this by using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux image builder tool, which is included as a hosted service with Insights. Image builder allows you to automatically create and launch standard OS templates— with compatibility to all major cloud providers and virtualization technology on the market—to ensure consistency across your entire IT environment.

Insights also helps troubleshoot services to proactively help your team understand when system configurations have drifted from baseline images and where patches could be applied by Red Hat.

Gaining visibility into potential security and compliance risks is critical. Insights helps you get ahead of security issues by assessing and prioritizing security checks, based on Red Hat product and industry knowledge to identify which environments are most at risk. Additionally, Insights proactively assesses your infrastructure for compliance, based on OpenSCAP policies, so your team can identify any compliance risks and subsequently remediate with playbooks that can be launched directly from within the Insights console. 

These services complement the extensive security features that are built into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, giving you a range of capabilities to keep you focused on security and aligned to compliance mandates and internal policies.

Skilled Linux resources are in demand due to continued Linux growth. This has created a challenge to find and hire the best Linux talent. Many organizations are also being required to do more with less by using resources with lower skill levels or by implementing lower-cost outsourcing programs. This leaves you with extensive estates to manage and Linux skills that are not as broad.

Insights can help you bridge this skills gap by supporting your existing team with its ability to pinpoint potential risks and provide remediation options. Remediation guidance describes how to fix the issue manually, and for most issues, Insights provides a remediation playbook that can be launched either directly from the console, or through Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform or Red Hat Satellite. This significantly reduces manual remediation for your team.

IT innovation fosters business and digital transformation. As new applications prepare for production, operational teams have to ensure they are stable, secure, and tested on the target on-premise or cloud platforms.

Operational teams that are continually reacting to unexpected issues do not have the time or focus they need to complete these crucial transitional steps from development to production. Because Insights works proactively to help avoid outages and downtime, your teams can move from a culture of reactivity to one of thoughtful innovation, where they have the time to finalize critical new applications.

Table 1. Benefits of Red Hat Insights

Deploying Insights allows you to operate more confidently, efficiently, and productively, with a full suite of additional management solutions to help you manage and automate across the IT life cycle.

Getting started with Insights is simple. Your administrator registers a client, reviews issues on a cloud-based visual dashboard, and remediates identified issues using the provided guidance and automated playbooks.

Read more about the capabilities of Insights or learn how to get started with Insights through your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription.