FAQ
Red Hat® Smart Management (formerly Red Hat Enterprise Linux® Smart Management Add-On) helps organizations optimize and manage their Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments, whether in the cloud or on-premise. Through a single subscription, organizations can address key IT challenges related to vulnerability, compliance, provisioning, and patching.
Answer: Red Hat Smart Management is an offering that helps organizations optimize and manage their Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments to better secure their IT infrastructure foundation.
Answer: Red Hat Smart Management includes Red Hat Satellite and new cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. These services are hosted on cloud.redhat.com and include vulnerability, compliance, and system comparison.
Answer: Starting May 7, 2018, Red Hat Insights will no longer be included as part of Smart Management. You will still have access to Red Hat Insights as part of your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription.
Answer: Smart Management can be purchased in the Red Hat Store and is available as a standalone product, but we recommend you purchase the combined Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Smart Management purchasing option. This offering is comprised of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Insights, and Red Hat Smart Management — including Red Hat Satellite and cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Different purchasing options may include additional products. Contact your Red Hat representative for options.
Answer: Yes, assuming the current Smart Management subscription was purchased on or after March 1, 2018. If your Smart Management subscription was purchased prior to March 1, 2018, you will need to renew to access these new services. Contact your Red Hat representative for more details.
Answer: Purchase one Smart Management subscription for each Red Hat Enterprise Linux system that you want to manage.
Answer: Smart Management is sold by socket pairs or virtual instances, just like Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For example, if you are using a 2-socket system, you will need one Smart Management subscription. A 4-socket system will require two Smart Management subscriptions.
Refer to the Red Hat Satellite FAQ.
Answer: Cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux help customers optimize their Red Hat environments across on-premise, cloud, and hybrid environments. These services include vulnerability, compliance, and system comparison and are hosted on cloud.redhat.com to help organizations address key IT challenges related to security, compliance, and configuration.
Answer: Visit cloud.redhat.com to access cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Answer: Cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux are included in Red Hat Smart Management.
Answer: No, you must purchase Red Hat Smart Management to access cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Answer: No. The Smart Management evaluation process does not give you access to cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Answer: Cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes several Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings. Specific features and capabilities will vary depending on the service, but at a high level most of the services will assess your environment, report findings, and remediate issues using Ansible® Playbooks.
Answer: The vulnerability service looks at all Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) with an errata and displays CVEs based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). It allows you to report on CVEs affecting your hosts. Many of the CVEs identified can be remediated using automated Ansible Playbooks.
Answer: Red Hat Insights has about 600 rules to cover security, availability, performance, and scalability. These rules do not map exactly to vulnerability as several rules may cover CVEs. As a result, Insights covers about 50 high-impact CVEs — less than 1% of the CVEs that Vulnerability covers, which is close to 20,000 CVEs.
Answer: The compliance service assesses and monitors your systems’ compliance with a security policy or individual rules. Ansible Playbooks can be generated to remediate common issues.
Answer: The system comparison service compares system configuration information between two or more systems. You can then filter and report on any similarities or differences between the configurations.
Answer: The system comparison service lets you export comparison results as CSV files in WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) format. Additionally, the comparison_report application programming interface (API) can be queried to return a list of all system similarities and differences in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format.
Answer: At this point, automated remediation is not part of the system comparison service’s features.
Answer: No. The system comparison service does not include content management capabilities.
Answer:Cloud services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses the Red Hat Insights client (insights-client) which is provided for supported versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. See Red Hat Insights: Getting Started for more information.
Answer: No. Cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is only available as a SaaS offering.
Answer: No.
Answer: No, you will not need a new client. However, you will need a package update to ensure that you are using the latest version of the Insights client.
Answer: You will continue to be able to use Insights with very little change. Cloud management services uses the same client. However, we recommend that you update the Insights client to the latest version.
Answer: No. There are no integrations with Satellite available.
Answer: Cloud management services can generate Ansible Playbooks to remediate many of the common issues that are discovered. The playbook is downloaded to your local host, then you will need to transfer the playbook to an Ansible host to run it.
Answer: No. There are no integrations with Ansible Tower available.