Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console: Your questions answered

Managing a hybrid environment can feel like a balancing act between disparate sets of fragmented tools used for all the different platforms you interact with. If that sounds familiar, then your team needs integrated management across your diverse hybrid infrastructure. With Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, you can manage your public cloud instances, on-premise virtualization, and security compliance all in one dashboard.

The Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console was built to solve fragmentation by unifying the management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat OpenShift, and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform into a single interface. In this guide, we're answering your top questions about the console's evolution to help you understand how it fits into your modern operational workflow.

Q: What is Hybrid Cloud Console?

A: Hybrid Cloud Console serves as a unified control plane for connecting to and centrally managing your diverse Red Hat platforms and infrastructure across your entire hybrid cloud environment. By providing a single point of visibility and operation, Hybrid Cloud Console simplifies the management of geographically distributed, diverse deployments.

This powerful console enables you to effectively manage and automate a broad spectrum of Red Hat offerings, including:

• RHEL infrastructure: Gain centralized management for your RHEL server fleet, enabling simplified patching, lifecycle management, and security compliance across your enterprise operating system deployments.
• OpenShift clusters: Administer and monitor your containerized applications and infrastructure running on OpenShift, streamlining cluster operations, resource management, and application deployment pipelines.
• Ansible Automation Platform infrastructure: Leverage the console to integrate with and manage your Ansible Automation Platform infrastructure, enabling the consistent execution and scaling of automation across your IT estate, from infrastructure provisioning to application configuration.
• Application services: Beyond core infrastructure, Hybrid Cloud Console also supports the management of various application services, offering a consolidated view and control point for the software components and services running on your Red Hat platforms.

Ultimately, the Hybrid Cloud Console enhances operational efficiency, enables consistency, and provides the tools to automate the management of your hybrid cloud and the critical deployments within it, regardless of where they reside—on-premises, in public clouds, or at the edge.

Q: Is Hybrid Cloud Console just for public cloud deployments?

A: No, the "hybrid" in Hybrid Cloud Console means it's a unified control plane for your entire estate, whether that's bare-metal in your data center, virtualized clusters, or instances in a public cloud.

This console isn't just for managing resources on AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. Its primary goal is to provide a "single pane of glass" that normalizes management across disparate infrastructure. If you're running RHEL on a physical server, a VMware guest, or an industrial edge device, the console provides the same level of visibility as a cloud instance.

The console aggregates data and management capabilities from:

• Physical hardware: On-premises bare-metal servers.
• Virtualization: Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift (formerly Red Hat OpenStack Platform), VMware vSphere, and Nutanix.
• Public cloud: AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud.

By connecting these environments, you break down operational silos. You can verify compliance, track costs, or define a standard operating environment (SOE) once and apply those standards consistently regardless of where the underlying compute resources reside.

Q: How can the Hybrid Cloud Console help me?

A: Hybrid Cloud Console is designed to serve as a "single source of truth," but the value it delivers depends entirely on your role within the organization.

Because Hybrid Cloud Console aggregates data from every layer of your infrastructure, it offers tailored views for different stakeholders. Here is how specific teams typically leverage the platform:

• IT operations and system administrators: For the people managing day-to-day operations, it provides centralized monitoring and patch management. You can track system health, apply remediation playbooks via Ansible, and manage inventory across thousands of endpoints without logging into individual servers.
• Business IT leaders: Executives gain a high-level overview of IT health. The dashboard aggregates operational data into "big picture" metrics, enabling informed decision-making on resource allocation and stability without getting lost in the technical weeds.
• Security and compliance: The console offers a unified security posture. Security teams use it to automate regulatory checks (CIS, HIPAA, and so on), receive alerts on critical CVEs, and trigger automated patching workflows to close vulnerability gaps faster.
• Cloud architects: Architects use the platform for hybrid cloud planning. Tools like image builder allow them to define standard operating environments (SOE) and push consistent gold images to AWS, Azure, and vSphere, helping to ensure the entire cluster fleet stays uniform.
• Procurement and software asset managers: The Subscription Central service simplifies renewal timing. It tracks real-time subscription usage against your contracts, helping you avoid over-purchasing while ensuring you remain compliant with your licensing.

By pairing unified visibility with automated remediation and predictive analytics, Hybrid Cloud Console goes beyond simply aligning your teams around a shared dataset. It equips you with the tools to be proactive. You aren't just watching your infrastructure—you're optimizing it before issues occur.

Hybrid Cloud Console goes beyond simply aligning your teams around a shared dataset. It equips you with the tools to be proactive.

Q: What role does AI play in the new console experience?

A: AI is no longer just a background feature, but an active partner that helps you predict issues, troubleshoot errors, and find answers faster.

Hybrid Cloud Console integrates AI across three distinct layers to move you from just managing infrastructure to automating it:

• HCC virtual assistant: This personal assistant can make API calls on your behalf to give you information about your account and assets. It can also quickly check for vulnerabilities or request access on your behalf from your organization administrator. If you are unsure how to register a new host or configure a user role, the virtual assistant provides step-by-step navigation guidance without you ever leaving the dashboard. You can also use this tool to give feedback or feature requests.
• Ask Red Hat: Think of this as your conversational gateway to Red Hat's collective knowledge. Instead of digging through documentation or knowledge base articles, you can ask complex technical questions using simple, everyday language. It synthesizes answers from over 1.5 million pieces of content that help you set up, troubleshoot, or use our products and experiences.
• Red Hat Lightspeed (formerly Red Hat Insights): Supercharge your subscription with proactive, AI-powered management and advanced security capabilities woven into your existing Red Hat experience. Gain visibility into business, operations, and security risks to proactively identify and mitigate issues across your infrastructure.

Together, these tools reduce the cognitive load of managing hybrid environments, allowing you to spend less time searching for answers and more time executing.

An active subscription is required to utilize Red Hat Lightspeed and Ask Red Hat. No active subscription is required for the virtual assistant.

Q: What is the cost of the Hybrid Cloud Console?

A: There is no additional software cost. If you have an active Red Hat subscription, you already have access to Hybrid Cloud Console.

The capabilities discussed in this article so far—from automated malware detection to image building—are included features of your existing RHEL, OpenShift, and Ansible Automation Platform subscriptions. You do not need to buy a separate license to unlock them.

The only "cost" is the operational effort of integration. While the console itself is a hosted service (meaning no management servers to install), incorporating it into your daily workflows requires some initial setup. This typically involves one or more of the following:

• Connecting hosts: Installing and registering the Insights client on your systems.
• Configuring integrations: Setting up webhooks to route alerts to your existing tools, such as Slack, Splunk, or ServiceNow.
• Adjusting process: Shifting your teams from reactive CLI troubleshooting to proactive dashboard monitoring.

Our recommendation is to start small. You don't need to onboard your entire estate at once. Register a single development cluster or a small group of RHEL servers today to evaluate the data. You can expand your use as you prove the value to your wider team.

Q: What are the most common things customers do with Hybrid Cloud Console?

A: Every organization has unique needs, but these are the three most common operational pillars: Security, inventory, and spend.

The console is a broad platform, but the most common uses of the Hybrid Cloud Console are these high-impact workflows:

• Vulnerability management: Security teams use the console to move beyond simple scanning. They prioritize risks based on impact rather than just severity scores, filtering out noise to focus on the CVEs that actually affect their specific environment. They then generate Ansible Playbooks to remediate those vulnerabilities at scale.
• Fleet management (RHEL and Red Hat OpenShift): Operations teams use it as their unified command center. For RHEL, this means tracking patch status and drift across thousands of servers. For Red Hat OpenShift, it means monitoring the health of every cluster—whether on bare metal or in the cloud—and performing over-the-air (OTA) upgrades with a single click.
• Cost management: Finance and leadership teams rely on the console to visualize the financial reality of the hybrid cloud. They use it to track spending trends, normalize cost data across different providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud), and map expenses back to specific business projects for accountability.

Of course these are only the most common entry points. As teams mature, they often expand into deeper capabilities, such as building standardized gold images, automating compliance auditing, and managing internal application catalogs.

Q: What are some unexpected benefits?

A: Beyond core inventory and subscription management, Hybrid Cloud Console includes powerful operational tools designed to address security, consistency, and deployment challenges. While many users log in initially to check a subscription status, they often stay for these three high-value capabilities included in the platform:

• Automated malware detection: Unlike standard vulnerability scanning that checks for outdated packages, this service actively scans your RHEL systems for known malware signatures. It identifies compromised systems that may have effective patches but remain infected through other security risks.
• Drift analysis: Troubleshooting why one server works but another server fails is a classic headache. With the Drift service, you can compare two systems (or one system against a baseline profile) line by line. It highlights differences in installed packages, kernel settings, and configuration files so you can spot configuration "rot" immediately.
• Cloud image builder: Instead of manually building and maintaining ISOs for every different environment, this tool lets you define a gold image just once. You can then export that single definition as an AWS AMI, an Azure VHD, or a vSphere template so your security standards are baked in from day one, regardless of the cloud provider.

These tools transform Hybrid Cloud Console from a passive reporting dashboard into an active part of your daily security and operations toolkit.

Q: Does connecting my on-premise infrastructure to Hybrid Cloud Console compromise security?

A: No, the connection architecture is designed to be outbound only, meaning you stay in control of what data leaves your environment. No inbound firewall ports need to be opened.

Security is the primary hesitation for many organizations when adopting a SaaS-based management plane. To address this, Red Hat built the connection on three specific security pillars:

1. Outbound directionality: The Red Hat Insights client (or operator on OpenShift) pushes data to the console over the standard HTTPS port (443). The console never initiates a connection into your data center. This means you do not need to punch holes in your firewall or create special DMZ exceptions for inbound traffic.
2. Metadata, not payload: The console collects configuration data, error logs, and performance metrics. It does not collect your application payload data, customer databases, or proprietary source code.
3. Granular obfuscation: You have complete control over the data sanitization. Before any data leaves your network, you can configure the client or data-gathering policy to redact sensitive information, such as hostnames, IP addresses, or specific keywords for complete anonymity.

Furthermore, because the Insights client is open source, your security team can inspect the code to verify precisely what is being collected and sent. There are no "black boxes" in the process. For a detailed breakdown of the data flow and redaction options, see the Red Hat Lightspeed data and application security guide and Red Hat OpenShift documentation.

Your infrastructure, one view

Hybrid Cloud Console has evolved beyond simple reporting to become an essential operational hub. By unifying your data across on-premise, virtualized, and public cloud environments, it cuts through the noise of managing a complex estate.

The most important takeaway is this: Hybrid Cloud Console is not an add-on product you need to purchase. It is included with your Red Hat subscriptions. The capabilities we discussed above—from predictive analytics to image building—are ready for you to use today.

Get started with Hybrid Cloud Console

It's just three easy steps to get started:

1. Log in: Go to console.redhat.com and log in with your Red Hat credentials. If you have an active subscription, then your account is already waiting for you.
2. Connect a host: If you haven't already, register your first system with the Red Hat Lightspeed (formerly Insights) client to start seeing data flow immediately.
3. Bookmark this guide: In the coming weeks, we'll update the answers above with links to detailed technical walkthroughs for image builder, cost management, and Red Hat Lightspeed.

Do you have a specific question that we didn't answer? Let us know by logging into console.redhat.com and clicking on the Feedback button at the bottom right of the screen.