Did you know that Red Hat Enterprise Linux for public clouds has management included?

An operating system without good management can be a challenge, but there is good news. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has long stood out due to the value delivered in its subscriptions. Since May of 2019, Red Hat Insights, which provides proactive management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances, has been included as part of the value of a RHEL subscription to no additional cost. 

Public cloud to on-prem, a single management tool covers RHEL 

Insights supports RHEL on public clouds - including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and others. No matter where you choose to run RHEL, you are supported through the ability to pinpoint potential security, performance, availability and stability risks so you can try to resolve them before they cause downtime or other operational impacts. This makes Insights a single tool for managing your RHEL instances across a complex and evolving hybrid cloud infrastructure. Insights works with active RHEL subscriptions for versions 6.4 and higher, whether they are on premises or on the cloud. 

Extensive analytics rules

Insights is a rules-based analytics engine that looks for certain conditions in your environments, then alerts you. Insights' more than 1,000 rules are based on extensive and curated Red Hat knowledge that comes from serving customers over many years. 

In addition to covering general RHEL issues, there are rules that cover RHEL running on public cloud instances and RHEL running specific workloads such as SAP. Each “rules hit” includes a description of the issue, impacted systems, and remediation guidance that tells you how to resolve the issue. “Trial and error” fixes are also a thing of the past when you have Insights working because the resolution steps are included. All of this can save you time. 

Getting started is easy

There are three main steps for installing and using Insights: 

• Register systems by installing the Insights client which should only take a few minutes.

• Review the risks identified You have the ability to look at issues in numerous ways, such as by type (e.g. security), by severity (e.g., critical), or even by topic (e.g., RHEL running SAP).

• Remediate the risks at your option.

Once the Insights client is enabled, Insights will scan your system daily, by default, and apply rule-based analysis to identify risks or optimizations. They are summarized in the dashboard on cloud.redhat.com (See Figure 1 below). From here you can resolve them using the provided remediation steps, if you choose. 

Figure 1: Red Hat Insights management analytics dashboard on cloud.redhat.com. 

To get started with Insights, the first thing you’ll need to do is create a Red Hat customer portal login if you don’t already have one using these instructions. This will give you access to the Red Hat Customer Portal and cloud.redhat.com which includes the Insights dashboard. Next, use the Getting Started page to enable the Insights client. 

Be sure you are on the Public Cloud sub-tab (See figure 2 below). This page has instructions on how to enable the Insights client for your public cloud instance. Then from here, you are ready to access your Insights dashboard to see what potential issues may be lurking in your RHEL on public cloud environments. 

Figure 2: Instructions for installing the Red Hat Insights client for RHEL on public cloud. 

Going to Re:Invent? See Insights in action 

If you are planning to attend AWS re:Invent 2019,  you can see Insights in action. Stop by the Red Hat booth anytime. Don't miss my theatre presentations on Insights. You can catch them on Tuesday December 3, 2019 at 3:30 p.m. or Wednesday December 4, 2019 at 2:00 p.m. I hope you will stop by the booth or listen to one of the theatre sessions. If you are not attending re:Invent, learn more about the benefits of using RHEL with Insights on AWS. Hope to see you there!