Modernizing RHEL management

Red Hat is innovating on new technologies to help manage your IT infrastructure. The hybrid cloud, where infrastructure spans between on-premises data centers and public cloud providers (such as AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform), has become very important for organizations that want to take advantage of the flexibility, agility and efficiency required to overcome the technological challenges of providing services to their customers and end-users.

To overcome the challenges of operating in an open hybrid cloud environment, we are expanding Red Hat Insights beyond just analytics and observability. In addition to identifying issues, Insights also provides end-to-end system management. It enables you to build and launch custom images as well as remediate patch and compliance issues.

Delivered as a service, Insights is designed to help reduce the complexity of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) across the hybrid cloud while keeping systems more secure and compliant.  This expansion makes RHEL more accessible and maintainable wherever organizations operate by minimizing the friction of managing systems on-premises and in the cloud. 

Here’s what you can expect from this Insights expansion.

Standardizing on custom image builds

Insights image builder

When you manage and deploy hundreds of hosts, building a standard operating system image or standard operating environment (SOE) is essential to ensure that the required software is available. Insights provides the tools to build SOEs quickly and efficiently with image builder. 

Check out this blog to learn more about image builder, or log into Insights to start creating your own images.

Third-party repositories

Image builder allows you to build an SOE with third-party software without additional scripting or customization. Simply add the third-party RPM repository to your organization and add the desired packages.

Image builder allows you to build an SOE with a RHEL subscription activation key embedded in it. You may also configure the image to connect automatically with Red Hat Insights.

Building images that include custom content is still in preview (which means not yet generally available), but you can try it out here.

Cloud deployment

Insights makes deploying hosts in the cloud easy from SOE images created with image builder. Hosts can be launched from an identical SOE image with a few button clicks. This is available today for AWS and Azure, with Google Cloud coming soon.

Active RHEL system management

Updates

Insights can deploy software updates to hosts on-premises or in the cloud, remotely from console.redhat.com. You will be informed what patches are available and on which hosts. You can select the updates you want to deploy and push them to hosts on-premises and in the cloud.

Patches

Insights enables control over patches with patch templates. You can configure a patch template so that specific hosts can only receive particular patches. Patch templates ensure that software versions do not conflict, causing unnecessary outages.

Learn how to use patch templates here.

Remediation

Remediation from Insights is not new, but until recently this functionality required a Red Hat Satellite subscription. Now this is included with all RHEL subscriptions—no Satellite required.

There are lots of ways to remediate from Insights, but the simplest option is to execute the remediation playbook directly from the console.

1. Make sure the host is connected to Insights via RHC (remote host configuration) or via a Satellite Server with cloud connector configured.
2. Click the blue remediate button to create a remediation playbook. This button is available in the advisor, patch, vulnerability, compliance and other windows where you can select systems or advisories that have automated remediation actions.  Follow the steps in the wizard to generate the playbook.

3. Execute the remediation playbook from the Insights automation toolkit.

Learn more

Along with all these great new Insights capabilities, we’ve released new documentation to help you get started:

• Discover more new features and enhancements in the Release Notes
• Check out the new guide for Deploying and managing RHEL systems in hybrid clouds
• Learn how to fix issues on RHEL systems with the Red Hat Insights Remediation Guide