Exploring Red Hat Access Insights

With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7, we’re happy to also announce general availability of Red Hat Access Insights, a new hosted service from Red Hat designed to help customers proactively identify and resolve issues that could impact business operations.

Given the complexity and scale of modern IT environments, we recognize that it can be increasingly complicated to monitor, maintain, and secure enterprise infrastructure.  By tapping into Red Hat’s collective experience

Red Hat Subscription Engineering created Red Hat Access Insights to help with issue discovery and remediation, allowing customers to focus on their own strategic goals rather than chasing down critical issues that Red Hat has already solved.

How it Works

The backbone of Red Hat Access Insights is the Insights engine. Powered by a global network of engineers and Red Hat’s extensive knowledge base of technical solutions and resolved issues, the Insights engine performs analysis of supplied system information, checking against our ever-growing database of deterministic rules.  The creation of these rules is the result of Red Hat Support’s work to identify and document best practices for optimizing workloads and avoiding issues. Red Hat Access Insights proactively shares this information and suggestions for remediation in a simple and easy-to-consume format - helping customers to streamline operations and avoid potential disruptions to their business.

Reviewing the list of alerts

An example alert

Red Hat Access Insights, available for both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, is not enabled by default. That said, it’s easy to get “up and running”.

First, install the rpm:

# yum install redhat-access-insights

Next, register your system:

# redhat-access-insights --register

Access Insights can register with the Red Hat Customer Portal or with a Red Hat Satellite using Red Hat Access Insights. In some circumstances additional configuration may be required (e.g. configuration of a proxy).  If you do run into trouble, more information can be found on our getting started page.

Security Matters

Red Hat Access Insights aims to provide a  secure service that customers can rely upon.  On-going collaboration with the Red Hat Product Security team ensures that our collection, analysis, and information management practices are best of breed.

In addition, on the server side, we have implemented the use of TLS for secure HTTPS transmission and support the use of both proxies and network ACLs. We have also committed to discarding irrelevant data. This means that with each successful upload, data from the previous upload is permanently removed. If you stop checking in, we’ll only keep the most recent upload for two weeks to provide any critical alerts during that time frame.

From a client perspective, as compared to traditional data collection practices, Red Hat Access Insights has minimized the amount of requisite collected data.  While collections are based on standards set by our popular troubleshooting utility sosreport, the average upload contains less than one percent of the data as collected in a standard support case.  Moreover, we’ve allowed users with strict data security policies to optionally blacklist and obfuscate sensitive and/or protected information.  Security is, of course, paramount and Red Hat Access Insights has been designed to meet the highest standards.  More information can be found on our Red Hat Access Insights security info page.

What’s Next

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is really just the beginning.  In the coming months we intend to develop rules for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform with delivery facilitated by Red Hat CloudForms.  From there… well, the sky's the limit. If you are interested in testing Red Hat Access Insights check out https://access.redhat.com/insights.  If you have thoughts, questions, or comments about Red Hat Access Insights feel free to reach out using the comments section (below), or by sending mail to: insights@redhat.com