Red Hat Insights provides continuous, in-depth analysis of registered Red Hat-based systems to proactively identify threats to security, performance and stability across physical, virtual and cloud environments and container deployments. Red Hat Insights is installed by default on Satellite Server. You can use the dashboard to quickly identify key risks to stability, security or performance. You can sort by category, view details of the impact and resolution, and then determine what systems are affected.
How to deploy Red Hat Insights on the server?
Two ways of doing it: manual and automatic.
Manual approach:
1. Log into the server where you want to install Insights agent as a root.
2. Install insights-client on the server.
yum install insights-client
3. Run from the command line insights-client command:
insights-client
4. You can expect the following result:
[root@vcs03 ~]# insights-client
Starting to collect Insights data for vcs03.example.com
Uploading Insights data.
Successfully uploaded report from 38cffa69-a830-41a8-9477-e9bd54ca1049 to account 5291234.
5. Verify the status and check-in in the Satellite → Navigate to Insights → Overview. Find the client and verify the check-in time:
Automatic Approach:
Use Ansible Role conveniently provided by Red Hat in the system role package. (Refer to my previous blog how to add Ansible Roles to Satellite).
1. Edit the single host to add Ansible Roles: Navigate to All Hosts and Click on Edit next to the selected Host.
2. Add the RedHatInsights.insights-client Role in the Ansible Role Tab. Click Submit:
3. Click on ‘Run Ansible Roles’ button on the All Hosts → Selected Host:
4. Enjoy your break waiting for the Ansible to finish all tasks. As always – you can verify the progress under Monitor → Tasks:
5. Alternatively, add the Ansible Role(s) to the hostgroup. Navigate to Configure-→ Host Groups. Click on the Host Group and select the Roles in the Ansible Roles Tab:
6. Click Submit and navigate to Hosts → All Hosts. Ensure that the hosts you want to play the Ansible Role against are assigned to the host group you have just modified.
7. Select the hosts you want to play the Role against. Click Select Action in the top right corner and click on Play Ansible roles:
8. Validate the tasks under Monitor → Tasks
OK, so we have the Roles and the insights agent installed on nodes.
What can we do with the Insights?
First of all, let’s verify the status of our fleet:
1. Navigate to Insights → Overview. Have a look at the action summaries:
2. Click on Actions Summary. Start from the High Severity issues:
3. For this issue, Red Hat did not provide the Ansible Playbook. You can click on the Rule and verify the actions.
4. It seems this specific issue might get resolved during the next patch cycle.
5. Click on the Medium risk:
6. Note that a few rules come with the Ansible Roles. Let’s use them!
7. Navigate to Insight → Inventory. Select the hosts on which you want to rectify the discovered issues and select ‘Create a new Plan/Playbook’ from the Actions:
8. Give Plan a name, select Actions with the Ansible Playbook (identified by the blue Ansible icon) and click Save:
9. After clicking on Save, you will be taken to the Planner page. Review the configuration and Click Run Playbook or Select Customise the Playbook Run. The second option will allow you to schedule the run of the Playbook:
10. In my example, I click Run Playbook:
As described above, Insights is a proactive tool which enables you to rectify the issues before they become a problem. Please feel free to reach out if you would like to know more.
