Take the unknowns out of RHEL upgrades with Red Hat Insights

Large scale, major release updates can be daunting. Red Hat can help.  

This article explores using Red Hat Insights to run a pre-upgrade analysis on all (or a group of) systems running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in your fleet. Results are displayed in a simple, consolidated view, giving you management-ready reporting on your organization’s OS upgrade readiness. 

Mission critical or fragile systems can be cumbersome to upgrade, especially when OS upgrades are long overdue or involve hosts with key users or applications. The key to a successful OS upgrade is planning and, ultimately, assessing the current situation. Customers can now run the RHEL pre-upgrade analysis utility to check for missing packages, misconfigurations and other well-known potential mishaps that can occur during an OS upgrade. Connect your system to Red Hat Insights to get started.

How it works

Red Hat Insights enables users to take a more proactive approach to system management, including access to vulnerability detection, drift alerting, compliance adherence, optimization recommendations and more. When connected, hosts will send a small amount of data to Insights, allowing Red Hat to detect any risks to your system. This data averages about 400 kB of transfer, which is about 1% of the information sent during an SOS report generated by Red Hat Support. 

Once connected to Insights, you also gain access to a suite of one-off “tasks,” or investigations, that Red Hat makes available to maintain the health of your environment. One of those tasks, RHEL’s pre-upgrade analysis utility, scans hosts for repository conflicts and application compatibilities, and includes a detailed priority list on how to prepare systems for an in-place upgrade.  

Users can select which systems are ideal for a pre-upgrade analysis, with filtering options based on OS version or tags.  

Customers have the ability to preview (and download) the playbook to understand the exact process before executing on the selected hosts. Once the task begins to run, it will create a series of “jobs” which will track the progress of running the playbook on each host. As hosts complete their jobs, each will report back on their upgradability, identifying blocking issues (“inhibitors”), non blocking issues (“problems”), and if appropriate, full readiness. 

Once all jobs on the hosts are complete, the task will be marked complete.  Customers can then view their aggregate results, dig into specific systems and even export the results and details.

After reviews and any required remediations are complete, users can proceed with the rest of the upgrade processes as defined in Supported in-place upgrade paths for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

System requirements

Red Hat Insights can run RHEL’s pre-upgrade analysis task on any systems connected via Remote Host Configurator (available in RHEL 8.5 or greater) or any systems connected via a Satellite.  Customers who don't fit these criteria can perform the pre-upgrade analysis directly on a host by following the instructions at  Chapter 4. Reviewing the pre-upgrade report. 

Easily configure your host via remote host configuration or Red Hat Satellite.

Get started

To view the pre-upgrade analysis and other available tasks, log into the Hybrid Cloud Console and navigate to Red Hat Enterprise Linux > Red Hat Insights > Toolkit >Tasks.  

As always, Red Hat welcomes and encourages your feedback. When in the Hybrid Cloud Console, simply click the purple "Feedback" tag in the lower right corner of your browser window. This sends feedback directly to the Red Hat Insights product management team and is reviewed regularly.