Simplify Linux management with Red Hat Lightspeed

Reliable IT infrastructure is essential for maintaining business continuity, supporting daily operations, and delivering exceptional user experiences. As organizations expand, their IT environments often become more complex, especially when managing workloads across environments from private datacenters to public clouds. This growing complexity requires efficient coordination, robust security measures, and optimized performance to prevent inefficiencies and downtime. By adopting advanced management tools, automation, and centralized monitoring, you can improve operational efficiency, adapt to evolving business demands, and ensure long-term scalability for your critical IT applications and services. 

Red Hat offers a unique suite of services that helps you manage and optimize your Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® infrastructure across hybrid and multicloud environments.

Red Hat Lightspeed (formerly Red Hat Insights) adds AI-powered management and advanced security capabilities to your existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription.

With predictive analytics and deep domain expertise, you can perform comprehensive analysis of your Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure—based on decades of Red Hat experience and technical knowledge—to proactively identify and remediate issues, reducing outages and unplanned downtime. Using Red Hat Lightspeed issue detection and continuous vulnerability alerts boost visibility into security risks and compliance status while supporting rapid remediation.

Offered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution through Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, Red Hat Lightspeed helps manage your environments from a single interface. You can even link your Red Hat account to your cloud provider account and automatically connect your cloud-based systems to Red Hat Lightspeed and other Red Hat services upon provisioning. With a focus on operations, security, and business outcomes, the services powered by Red Hat Lightspeed help you stay ahead of critical issues, freeing you to focus on innovation.

Red Hat Lightspeed is included with your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, letting your team get started today. Visible immediately after you log in to Hybrid Cloud Console, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux dashboard is the central entry point for managing your systems. From this unified interface, you can search for systems, view an inventory of all your registered assets, and begin exploring the features that help you monitor, analyze, and remediate issues. This streamlined interface ensures your team can take advantage of Red Hat Lightspeed capabilities to enhance operational efficiency and security.

Here are 6 services powered by Red Hat Lightspeed that help streamline management of your entire Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment.

Standardized operating environments can help you improve consistency, enhance security, and streamline maintenance across your IT infrastructure. By ensuring that every system is built with the same proven baseline, standardized images reduce configuration deviation, simplify troubleshooting, and speed deployment processes. This approach also minimizes the risk of errors and enhances compliance with organizational policies, leading to more stable and reliable infrastructure.

With the image builder service, you can create customized, deployment-ready system images for a variety of use cases, including installation disks, virtual machines, and cloud-based instances. These repeatable operating system images ensure consistent provisioning and deployment across all environments— from on-site infrastructure and public cloud resources to edge devices. You can build custom Red Hat Enterprise Linux images in a few simple steps. Select your platform, define a template that specifies file systems, packages, and user configurations, and then build and deploy the new image. Additionally, the image builder service automatically handles the complexities of deploying to various platforms, simplifying compatibility with major cloud providers and virtualization technologies so you can provision new Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems that meet your operational requirements.

Assessing regulatory compliance of modern IT environments can be challenging due to the evolving nature of external standards and complex internal policies. Noncompliance not only increases the risk of security breaches and legal penalties but also undermines trust with stakeholders and customers. However, remaining in compliance with corporate, industry, and government regulations demands continuous oversight, regular assessments, and a proactive strategy that adapts to a changing regulatory landscape.

With the compliance service, you can efficiently assess, monitor, report, and remediate both internal and external regulatory and compliance requirements across your Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment. Built on the open source implementation of the security content automation protocol (SCAP) standard—openSCAP—it offers a straightforward, powerful user interface for creating, configuring, and managing SCAP security policies. With the compliance service, you can evaluate systems against multiple policies: Use policies defined in the system security guide for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, create custom policies, or tailor existing rules to better fit your organizational needs. The compliance service also provides policy and system views that show the number of systems evaluated and their level of compliance, making it simpler to identify and remediate potential issues. With a configurable compliance threshold for each policy and the option to remediate noncompliant systems using Ansible® Playbooks, you can efficiently manage and meet regulatory and compliance requirements across your hybrid cloud infrastructure.

A faster response to IT issues and risks is essential for minimizing downtime, protecting sensitive data, and maintaining business continuity. Delays in addressing security vulnerabilities, performance degradations, or compliance gaps can lead to costly disruptions and increased exposure to threats. By proactively detecting and responding to potential issues, you can prevent small problems from escalating into major incidents.

By integrating notifications directly into your preferred tools, you can ensure that critical alerts—based on predictive analytics and domain expertise and assisted by artificial intelligence (AI)—reach the right people at the right time. With multiple integration options like Event-Driven Ansible, you can reduce the complexity of managing multiple tools while improving visibility across your infrastructure. For even greater flexibility, Red Hat Lightspeed provides guidance for custom integrations, allowing you to tailor notifications to your operational needs. By receiving real-time alerts within your existing workflows, you can reduce operational complexity, improve transparency, and respond to potential issues before they affect your users.

Reducing risks across your systems is essential for optimizing availability, performance, stability, and security. Systematic risk assessments and continuous monitoring can uncover subtle vulnerabilities before they escalate, allowing you to address issues proactively. By mitigating these potential threats, you not only prevent disruptions but also enhance overall system integrity and resilience.

Taking advantage of more than 20 years of Red Hat support experience, the advisor service identifies issues and known configuration risks across your operating system, underlying infrastructure, and workloads. Each automated recommendation includes a detailed description, a prioritized risk assessment based on historical remediation experience, and information about the number of systems affected. You can view risks by system, type, severity, or effect of change, and even sort findings by common topics. Tailored remediation guidance—often including a predefined Ansible Playbook—lets you streamline issue resolution at scale. With more than 1,900 recommendations covering diverse workloads—from SAP and Microsoft SQL Server to enterprise databases and public cloud optimizations—the advisor service provides prescriptive guidance accessible to all skill levels, empowering your entire team to remediate issues rapidly and efficiently.

Identifying and remediating Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) is critical for safeguarding sensitive data, preventing unauthorized access, and increasing regulatory compliance. Rapid resolution of vulnerabilities minimizes the risk of exploitation by malicious actors and reinforces overall system integrity, while also ensuring business continuity and maintaining stakeholder trust. However, the continuous emergence of new threats and the complexity of assessing potential impacts across diverse environments can make it challenging to prioritize and address risks effectively.

The vulnerability service helps you assess, monitor, report, and remediate CVEs that affect your Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments. It provides a detailed list of CVEs—including publication dates, common vulnerability scoring system (CVSS) scores, and the number of systems affected—while offering the flexibility to define your own business risk if the standard assessments do not align with your operational needs. An intuitive, color-coded dashboard displays key risk metrics including likelihood, effect, and total risk, allowing you to quickly gauge system health and prioritize critical vulnerabilities. After identifying potential issues, you can use the vulnerability service to create comprehensive remediation plans for all affected hosts or target specific CVEs, ensuring efficient and effective risk management across your infrastructure.

Keeping systems current through regular patching is critical for IT security, stability, and performance. Regular patching not only prevents vulnerabilities from being exploited but also ensures that your systems operate at optimal efficiency and meet compliance standards. With a proactive, automated approach to patch management, you can minimize downtime and avoid costly disruptions across your entire hybrid cloud environment.

The patch service simplifies update and patch processes by monitoring and analyzing your systems to determine which Red Hat product advisories apply across your deployment environments. It provides a centralized view of available advisories—listing advisory names, publication dates, types, affected systems, and a brief synopsis—so you can identify the current patching status of every registered system more quickly. Additionally, the patch service lets you prioritize critical advisories based on type, severity, and system criticality, and helps you discover systems that have fallen behind in the patching process. Once the necessary patches are identified, you can apply them manually or automate the process using Ansible Playbooks.

Red Hat Lightspeed delivers automated, proactive analytics to help you manage and optimize your Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure across hybrid and multicloud environments. By continuously monitoring for risks, streamlining remediation, and integrating with existing workflows, Red Hat Lightspeed enhances security, compliance, and operational efficiency. With its predictive capabilities and deep domain expertise, Red Hat Lightspeed empowers you to stay ahead of potential issues, reduce downtime, and focus on innovation.

Read more about Red Hat Lightspeed.