September 2017 service release: CI/CD client now in tech-preview, and feature updates

The Red Hat Insights team is pleased to present our September 2017 service release.

Red Hat Insights is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) that helps prioritize risk remediation and prevent unplanned downtime. Insights enables customers to proactively monitor and quickly remediate for infrastructure risks and critical security alerts detected in their environments. Using Insights requires no added infrastructure expansion, with no complex setup or configuration, and can be deployed across most infrastructures in a few seconds.

Insights offers automated remediation capabilities via Ansible Playbooks for both Ansible core and Red Hat Ansible Tower, as well as enhanced executive reporting features and overall infrastructure health scoring.

Our September 2017 release brings several new features to the Customer Portal Insights Web UI that are currently available for production environments, and next generation beta features that are offered for testing and feedback in our technology preview service called Insights Beta. Accompanying this release there is also a new Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) client for Insights integrations with containers and container images in technology preview. For more information about technology previews, see Technology Preview Features Support Scope.

Read below for more information or check out the new features and let us know your thoughts by using the "Provide Feedback" button from within the Insights UI.

For more information about the latest Insights release, refer to our Red Hat Insights Release Notes.

Newest features:

Expanded Red Hat Ansible Tower integration

Insights and Ansible Tower now offer improved reporting integration in the newly released Ansible Tower 3.2

With Ansible Tower 3.1, we built the first step of our integration with Red Hat Insights - allowing you to sync Insights remediation playbooks to Ansible Tower for use as needed. We’ve continued to enhance this integration in Ansible Tower 3.2. Now, we bring the ability to view Insights Actions directly in Ansible Tower. With this, you can more easily see your minor, major, and critical issues, and with just a few clicks, schedule remediation with Insights Plans.

Insights CI/CD Client available as Technology Preview

For those who would like to be on the cutting edge, a new Insights client that can be integrated directly into a container centric CI/CD pipeline is now available, enabling the identification of risk earlier in a development cycle within images or containers. The new client is designed for flexibility and allows for integration with the existing CI/CD tools such as Jenkins or GitLab CI.

If you'd like to run the new client in a non-production environment please make sure you update your available channels list for your product subscriptions and then follow "How do I get the new Insights client?".

For additional details on how to begin using Insights with CI/CD & examples please visit Red Hat Insights GitHub, RedHatInsights/insights-CI-examples: Sample project for Insights container build scanning demo

Risk of Change [Beta]

Some remediations are more complex than others and may require additional planning due to the impact they have on the environment it’s running on; such as those that require a kernel update and reboot vs a simple modification to a line in a configuration file. Insights now evaluates the “risk" of the change (Very low, Low, Moderate & High) as to the impact that change has on your environment and presents that to the user. By displaying this additional information we aim to provide you a quick idea of the effort required and to assist you in finding the easy fixes / low hanging fruit and remove that risk from your infrastructure. This is a filterable value while viewing lists of hits and is presented to users on rule & impacted system drill downs.

This information is also now presented when generating a playbook within Insights, where a user can select between a fix and a mitigation. By highlighting the risk of the change as well as if that selection requires a reboot, we hope to better inform the user on the impact this generated playbook will have on their environment by mitigating these detected issues within Insights.

Improved Executive Reporting functionality

Based on customer feedback, the Overall Score presentation has been redesigned as a gauge to provide a better understanding of your current score, the color-coded health of that score, and the overall range used. For more details on "Overall Score" please visit https://access.redhat.com/articles/3199992.

PDF Download now available in Next-gen Beta environment. Users now have the ability to export their account's executive report into PDF format allowing for the report to be easily shared.

Inventory view changes

The available inventory and criteria filters on each page of Insights have been redesigned to give you more control and less intrusive. The new page filters now come collapsed by default to give you as much screen real estate as possible. When expanding these filters you will now find additional options for filtering that have been added to each page. When selecting one or more filters, breadcrumbs are displayed to easily show you the active filters on your current view.

To improve the overall and experience for accounts with larger deployment we have removed the previously used "infinite scrolling" and have implemented pagination for these pages. This pagination will still allow for filtering while significantly reducing the amount of time needed for these pages to initially load and to be used.

Planner and Playbook builder changes

The addition of the Playbook summary provides users with clearer visibility of affected systems chosen, the resolution that has been selected, as well as a reboot summary to identify reboot requirements for that playbook, if applicable, to allow for adequate planning and personnel coordination for maintenance windows.

TLDR;

A big thank you from myself and the Insights team to all the customers and Red Hatters who provide feedback that helps us prioritize new features and quality of life value-added improvements. We hope you enjoy the new features and functionality. Please let us know how we can continue to improve the Insights service and what you think of the new enhancements!

Will