At Red Hat Summit in May 2019 we introduced Red Hat Smart Management. Red Hat Smart Management combines the flexible and powerful infrastructure management capabilities of Red Hat Satellite with the simplicity of cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It helps users more securely manage any environment supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux—from physical machines to hybrid multiclouds.

As IT environments continue to grow in complexity, spanning from enterprise datacenters to multiple public clouds, organizations need management solutions that can keep pace with rapidly changing infrastructure. Traditional management solutions often lack the flexibility and oversight needed to manage today’s IT, which can result in organizations using unintegrated tools and processes and struggling to stay proactive in the face of systems management, security and compliance. 

Red Hat Smart Management introduces a new era of management solutions, ones that are designed to give IT teams more control and oversight over their infrastructure and help make cloud-native, hybrid and multicloud environments even more secure, manageable and compliant. Red Hat’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) management offerings are aimed at decreasing the time to deliver innovation to our customers, allowing Red Hat to provide continuous improvements and enhancements without waiting on major code releases.

The October 2019 release of Smart Management includes new features and enhancements for both
Red Hat Satellite and cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The release includes Red Hat Satellite 6.6 which focuses on updates across reporting, automation and supportability, including:

Automation 

  • The latest edition of Red Hat Ansible Engine, version 2.8
  • Ansible variables as smart class parameters
  • OpenSCAP deployed by Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Reporting

  • Ability to schedule and email reports
  • Reporting performance enhancements including new default applied errata report

Supportability

  • Using Red Hat Insights rules for Red Hat Satellite users are now able to more easily identify where Satellite could better operate, perform and scale 
  • Content view dependency resolution enables content views to automatically include any required dependencies when updated
  • Image Builder integration enables users to create a RHEL image and to provision from that image in Satellite
  • Improved workflows makes upgrades easier and more reliable
  • Scale improvements and tuning parameters help to keep Satellite running reliably and at scale
  • A new task dashboard gives users a more streamlined view of tasks and their stats
  • Additional notification drawer items, such as paused tasks or tasks needing attention

The latest version of Red Hat Smart Management also includes updates and enhancements to  cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which includes vulnerability, compliance, and drift analysis/system comparison. Cloud management services are a SaaS offering, so some of the capabilities included below have been part of the product since launch, as we continuously improve and update the offerings. 

Since its launch in May, cloud management services has added the following capabilities with the goal of providing better management of security issues, custom controls to deliver more value, and an improved user experience:

Vulnerability

  • Set a business risk for specific CVEs impacting servers to bring attention to high severity issues and allow users to manage the risk of these issues based on the business needs.
  • Set status for a CVE and systems affected by it rather than having to individually set them, allowing users to triage and filter rules more efficiently.
  • Option to exclude a given system from a Vulnerability analysis. This enables users to remove noise from the view and focus on the critical few. Additionally, CVSS Metrics makes it easier to quickly identify the reason for the CVSS rating.

Compliance

  • Streamlined the upload of OpenSCAP reports via Red Hat Insights 
  • The ability to query or sort rules with identifiers within a policy, enabling users to triage and filter rules more efficiently
  • The ability to search by system name and to filter and sort by a “Severity” field for policy rules in the system view, helping to identify the severity of each rule included as part of a policy. Triaging compliance issues and remediating them becomes much easier with this attribute as users can focus on the heavy-hitters.
  • Set a business objective for the policy, allowing users to keep track of and tie security compliance to the business impact
  • The ability to filter rules when users have multiple policies assigned to a system

Drift Analysis / System Comparison 

  • Accessing System Comparison is now located under a new Drift Analysis menu
  • Introduction of the concept of Baselines into System Comparison, enabling users to define a baseline of how a system configuration should look and easily compare hosts to that baseline
  • CSV download via the API
  • General UI improvements

Additionally, a new on-boarding tour has been added to help explain how to use cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The tour will quickly walk users through the capabilities of cloud management services and will highlight new features as they are added. 

To take advantage of the new Red Hat Satellite features customers can upgrade to the latest version of Red Hat Satellite. For information on upgrading to the latest version of Red Hat Satellite, refer to the
documentation or use the Red Hat Satellite Upgrade Helper. The latest features available in cloud management services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux are available now at cloud.redhat.com. 

If you have any questions or feedback please feel free to reach out to us at smartmanagement@redhat.com

 

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Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to deliver reliable and high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies.

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