Open hybrid cloud is Red Hat’s vision for the future of IT and it spans everything we do, from driving research and education in open source technology to making it the focal point of our company strategy and product portfolio. Since its launch, we've heard about the tangible benefits that Red Hat Insights has provided our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) customers, like simplifying operational, security, and ⎼ most recently ⎼ business related tasks. That's why I'm excited to announce that we are expanding Insights to drive towards a holistic view across IT environments, and into Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. 

Insights provides visibility, risk identification, remediation guidance and help resolving problems at scale.This common set of hosted services enable leaders throughout the organization, regardless of their focus area or IT domain, to see operational and security risk, and cost utilization, across their open hybrid cloud environments so they can streamline IT, security and business operations.

Customer feedback has been a meaningful voice behind the expansion of Insights to better understand their roadblocks, plans and how we can better help them meet their business needs along the way. Many of our customers have their eyes set on a hybrid cloud future to help deliver value more quickly to their own stakeholders. But in order to realistically move ahead, they must first address major challenges. They need to reduce the friction that comes with operating traditional environments alongside cloud-native footprints and close the gap between skill sets and resources. They need to do this to help drive business innovation, keeping the organization competitive and adaptable to a dynamic market.

One solution is creating a better avenue for the free flow of information between teams. Insights provides a common set of capabilities that integrate across tools, platforms and processes to foster and encourage open communication, so IT organizations can successfully break down silos and adjust to frequent collaboration. 

Another benefit of a single view across technologies is the ability to streamline tasks, like pulling reports and analysis, by eliminating duplicate ways to do the same thing in favor of one standardized process. These communication and task pipelines are must-haves for properly handling the complex environments of hybrid cloud, and a catalyst for the Insights expansion.  

Insights became a default offering for all active RHEL subscriptions in 2019. Since then, we’ve seen the impact that Insights has made with customers, helping them to identify and remediate security, compliance and configuration issues in their RHEL environments, as well as improve cost management. 

How Insights has evolved to meet customer needs

We then began broadening the trajectory of Insights; last year, we introduced its first application-focused view for SAP HANA deployments, making it easier for IT teams to manage what they cared about, starting with SAP systems running in larger environments and enhancing security on RHEL. 

But as we spoke to more customers, we heard that confining Insights into an exclusive benefit for RHEL users was unrealized potential. And so our vision then expanded to fit the growing challenges facing today’s customers. With this announcement, we are now providing customers with a second set of eyes, as one customer called it, into more platforms and environments - so that it will be easier for customers to adopt and manage their own open hybrid cloud strategy with confidence.

Insights meets Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible Automation Platform are two powerful, leading solutions that our customers use to build out, deploy and automate cloud-native applications. Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, is the future of modern applications. Ansible Automation Platform helps IT teams coordinate more efficient, impactful processes and share expertise. 

Incorporating Insights’ business services has the potential to make a big impact on these workflows. For Red Hat OpenShift specifically, we’re in a unique position to provide customers with the visibility to help them understand where to best run workloads to maintain governance and manage cost sprawl. The centralized view of subscription utilizations, as well as cloud costs and usage, can also help track overall IT budgets against organizational initiatives.

Looking ahead

Now that we are delivering the value of Insights beyond just RHEL, it opens up benefits to new workloads, edge deployments and into more specific applications and environments. It creates new pathways for customers to view and analyze data in different ways, helping them to proactively address a broad range of risks or challenges they may face in the IT environment, backed by Red Hat’s expertise and industry best practices. 

IT teams can find “the signal in the noise” to help keep environments more secure, stable and performing as intended. As we dive deeper into a hybrid cloud world, the feedback we receive from our customers continues to help guide our roadmap ahead, whether it’s recounting pain points, highlighting new innovations or outlining dynamically changing responsibilities. We want to know: What Insights would you like to see next?

Keep an eye out for new enhancements to Insights across RHEL, Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible Automation Platform, and learn how our customers around the world are using Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud portfolio to achieve technological advancements.


About the author

Adrian Phillips leads the team of product and technical marketers responsible for Red Hat Insights. From leading marketing at startups to helping large organizations innovate, his passion is ultimately helping customers transform the way they work using SaaS and cloud-based solutions. Phillips holds a degree in journalism, and loves competing in disc golf tournaments when he's home in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Read full bio