Modernizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux System management the easy way

As an IT manager, you need to establish the right processes to be confident in your teams’ ability to keep critical applications running smoothly and securely. Most companies face challenges like stretched IT staff, a complex technology stack, and environment sprawl that now includes public and private clouds. It becomes clear that you have to help your teams work smarter, because manual methods cannot keep pace with these trends.  

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the intelligent operating system of choice for many customers. Why? Many factors including a hardened operating system, years of Red Hat experience in supporting a very diverse set of customer needs, management through Red Hat Insights, attention to security and more play into this. Recognizing the management challenges of cloud and on-premises deployment models and limited staff, we have designed Insights to provide proactive management analytics that can help your teams deliver IT services with confidence.  (Figure 1) 

Work smarter

What factors could play into typical system issues or a problem on your cloud application? It can be a combination of a series of small factors -- for example a workload running on a specific OS version with a specific configuration setting. This combination can be difficult to spot in advance of a problem when your system administrator does not have time to drill into a server or cloud instance daily to manually look for potential issues. There are frequently just too many different on-premises or cloud instances assigned to a system administrator to be able to focus on any one environment deeply. 

Manual methods can no longer keep up with the pace of change and growth or the complexity of the technology stack. What’s needed is analytics that routinely analyze all Red Hat Enterprise Linux computing environments and help your system administrators understand where to focus their attention and how to solve the issue. When applications run with less downtime or other issues, confidence is inspired across your business. 

7/24 eye on security and compliance

In today’s computing world, when security and compliance requirements are out of alignment, everything else takes a secondary role. As a top of mind issue, your management functions must continually provide visibility into the security of your environments, and you need to have an idea if you are aligned to OpenSCAP and industry compliance mandates. Environments change regularly, so a routine way to analyze for potential security and compliance threats is essential.  

When it comes to building confidence in your computing environments, security and compliance play a central role. A best practice here is to see that there is routine and regular analysis of your environments so you know where it stands and whether something needs to be addressed. 

Optimize skills at every turn

Linux is often the platform of choice for running the most essential applications for your business. It is also a common platform for cloud innovations. With so much computing depending on Linux, skilled resources are in high demand, and so those on your team with deep Linux skills may be stretched. 

The right management solutions will help your IT staff know where to focus their attention across a sea of on-premises and cloud-based environments. When guidance is included for resolving identified risks, your team is able to learn by doing. This can help you build a deeper skills bench for Linux management at the same time as you resolve potential issues before downtime results.  (Figure 2)

Figure 2: For every potential issue identified by Insights, the resolution steps are included.  This helps teams quickly understand how to resolve the issue. Many issues also include playbooks that can be executed with Ansible Automation Platform to resolve the issue and your team can also create their own playbook.  

Foster a culture focused on innovation 

And finally, innovation is important for advancing your business. An application is not “done” until it goes through your operational teams in the transition from development to production.  Before a new application is ready for use, security approvals and a variety of stability and performance checks must all be completed.  

Any unexpected outages or unplanned maintenance can throw your staff into reactive “fire-fighting” mode, leaving little time for thoughtful innovation. By modernizing and changing the way you manage systems, you can lay the groundwork for a culture that is focused on innovation and has a passion for it.  

Getting your team started 

Implementing best practices like these is a tall order, but choosing the right platform can help.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Red Hat Insights capabilities can help you proactively manage security, performance, stability and availability on your systems so your team can focus their attention on potential risks and  resolve them before an outage or other system impact occurs. Ask your team to give Red Hat Insights a try starting at our Red Hat Insights page.  If you would like to learn more, you will find additional information on this site.