Ask an OpenShift Admin Office Hour - Red Hat Insights for OpenShift

Red Hat Insights uses data from your Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems to proactively make recommendations, and offer remediation, hopefully all before they become actual issues.

But, Insights doesn’t just work with RHEL. It works with several other Red Hat products, including OpenShift. During this stream we were joined by John Spinks, Technical Marketing Manager, to look at Insights’ data, recommendations, and integration with OpenShift, getting a better idea of the benefits of having a connected cluster.

The Level-Up Hour also had an episode on a similar topic, connected clusters, recently. If you’re interested in even more details, be sure to watch that stream too!

As always, please see the list below for additional links to specific topics, questions, and supporting materials for the episode!

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Episode 37 recorded stream:

Use this link to jump directly to where we start talking about today’s topic. 

This week’s top of mind topics:

• OpenShift does not, by default, reserve any node resources for system level functions. You can manually configure the system-reserved and kube-reserved resources for your cluster, or you can allow kubelet to automatically set the values for you.
• Most of the time we show updates being applied to a cluster via the admin console, but you can also use the CLI or the API to perform upgrades, including changing the upgrade channel.
• When you scale down a MachineSet, how do you know which nodes will be selected to be destroyed? By default, it’s random, but did you know that you can change that? You can have the oldest or newest nodes preferred if desired. You can also prioritize specific nodes using an annotation.

Questions answered and topics discussed during the stream:

• Red Hat Insights is a cloud-based offering which takes collected data and provides predictive information and remedies for issues in your RHEL, Ansible, and OpenShift environments. Ansible and OpenShift were recently added to the capabilities earlier this year, which is why we’re focusing this episode on Insights for OpenShift.
• Insights is also expanding visibility for subscription and resource optimization, so that you’re able to get an idea of whether or not you’re maximizing the amount of entitlements you have vs the workload that has been deployed.
• How long does it take for an OpenShift release to go from the fast channel to stable? There’s no hard rule for this, it’s generally based on metrics and takes anywhere from two days to a week. This can be different for y-releases, such as 4.7 to 4.8, which can take a bit more time while engineering continues to analyze the data and look for anomalies.
• Does Insights only use the telemetry data sent from clusters to console.redhat.com? There is an Insights Operator which does collect some additional information.
• Does Insights look at all components of OpenShift - RHCOS, Kubernetes, and the services / features of OpenShift? Yes, though it does not currently provide data about individual Pods for customer applications, which is available from other places such as Advanced Cluster Manager or Advanced Cluster Security.
• Does Insights work in a disconnected environment? No, it does need to be able to connect to the Red Hat servers to send data.
• John does a demo of the Insights interface, starting here, including cost management.