Edge-compatible recommendations now available in Red Hat Insights Advisor

The open hybrid cloud vision of Red Hat covers four footprints: physical, virtual, cloud and edge. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is at the forefront of the innovation that comes with edge computing by providing a more consistent, reliable and security-focused operating system to fuel the demand from enterprises to operate at the closest point of data generation.

Red Hat Insights is a valuable part of the RHEL subscription and experience across all footprints of the hybrid cloud, with edge being no exception. We have made Advisor recommendations compatible with RHEL deployed at the edge to help you extend your data center capabilities. You will have an analytics tool at your disposal which will help keep your servers healthier by proactively highlighting operational issues.

Connecting edge hosts to Insights

To connect an edge host to Red Hat Insights you need to take the following steps.

1. Build an edge image with Insights Client, Subscription Manager and Red Hat Connector packages installed

The first (and easiest) option is to use the Edge Management application to build an edge image. In this case, insights-client, subscription-manager and rhc packages are installed by default into the edge image.

The second option is to use Image Builder within the RHEL Web Console of one your RHEL hosts. You need to add insights-client, subscription-manager and rhc packages to the blueprint during the process of building an edge image manually:

Figure 1: How to include Red Hat Insights related packages in device images

2. Create an edge computing system based on the edge image

3. Register the edge computing system to Red Hat Insights

There are two ways you can do this.

Registration via Red Hat Connector

# rhc connect

Registration via subscription-manager and insights-client 

# subscription-manager register
# insights-client --register

4. Visit the Insights Advisor or Inventory application on console.redhat.com to see the analysis results

Figure 2: The view after an edge computing host is registered to Red Hat Insights

Identified recommendations include resolutions tailored to the edge computing host. 

Figure 3: The view of the resolution tailored for a registered edge computing host

What makes a recommendation edge-compatible

The insights-client can be installed and used on systems created on top of edge images, which are called “edge computing systems.” One of the key differences between RHEL hosts and edge computing systems is that installing/updating RPM packages on edge computing systems is completed by updating the edge image instead of using yum/dnf. Insights now determines if the system is an edge host, and will adapt the remediation steps accordingly.

Identify operational issues at the edge

With Red Hat Insights enabled at the edge, you can now benefit from the features of Insights Advisor you’ve known for years, identifying performance, security, stability and availability risks long before they start impacting your environment. 

More than 100 recommendations were made available for edge hosts running RHEL, providing tailored, step-by-step remediations applicable either via the Edge Management application or the RHEL web console. Set up your RHEL subscription now, deploy it to the edge and connect to Insights to get the latest recommendations!

We are constantly looking for feedback to improve our products. If you have suggestions or questions about Red Hat Insights, feel free to reach out to us using the feedback form in the Hybrid Cloud Console or the Red Hat Customer Portal feedback form. 

Learn more

• Managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux at the edge 

• Edge computing with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 

• Red Hat Insights product page