The new girl in the hood!

First of all, let me introduce myself, my name is Amaya Gil and I’m a new Insights SME (so you will see a lot of me from now on), working as a Technical Marketing Manager in the Management BU at Red Hat.

I’m a Computer Science Engineer from Madrid (Spain) and I’ve been a Redhatter since 2.010 evolving from different EMEA SA roles to the BU.

I also happen to speak four languages and since English is one of them… here you go!

What is Red Hat Insights?

Haven't heard of Red Hat Insights yet? No problem, this is Red Hat Insights first stop!!!

Red Hat Insights is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering that 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 analyzes select files on a system, getting smarter with each additional piece of intelligence and data. Red Hat Insights can automatically discover relevant information, proactively recommend tailored next actions, and even automate tasks with Ansible Playbooks. Using Red Hat Insights, customers can benefit from the experience and technical knowledge of Red Hat Certified Engineers, making it easier to identify, prioritize, and resolve issues before business operations are affected.

As a SaaS offering, Red Hat Insights regularly updates and expands its knowledge base to reflect new IT challenges that can impact the stability of mission-critical systems.

We even got a video for you!

If I was still unable to make myself clear with what Red Hat Insights is, in this link I leave you a very quick video that would definitely clear your mind: Introduction to Red Hat Insights

Getting started with Red Hat Insights

To access Red Hat Insights, you just need a valid subscription to Red Hat and install the agent on each and every machine you want to monitor, it is as simple as running this command:

[root@server ~]# subscription-manager register --auto-attach
​[root@server ~]# yum install redhat-access-insights
[root@server ~]# redhat-access-insights --register

But no worries! You can also evaluate Red Hat Insights before purchasing it,
to begin evaluating Red Hat Insights, visit Insights Evaluation to activate any available evaluations associated with your account. This step must be completed prior to any system registration with Insights (the steps above).

You must have RHEL 6 and later, or RHEL 7 and later, to use Insights (this process can be automated in different ways, further info can be found at Getting Started with Insights.

Finally after registration, the Insights client will upload initial system metadata to Red Hat Insights. You should be able to immediately see your system in the Insights user interface.

Insights from the UI

First stop is the Dashboard, which will give you a quick overview of your systems, latests news from Red Hat, actions summary and plan summary.

At a glance, Insights allows you to see your systems health, as well as some other intresting things like Latest news from Red Hat (under Latest box) or your Newest Systems (newly registered into Insights), Actions to be taken (in a summary form) or all of your Plans Summary, which gathers all the actions to be taken into groups of machines (previously defined by you).

In the left side of the screen you can see all the Insights features in the form of tabs.

Insights prioritizes security and displays graphical and easy to understand alerts, that gives you a clear idea of the impact a given risk has for your infrastructure.

• Hot items = Red Hat will occasionally update this to point you to new / interesting information or Vulnerabilities.
• High prio = Systems not checking in or critical suggestions from Red Hat about what to check out.
• Plan Summary = A glance into current Action Planner plans and their completion status.
• Actions Summary = numerical representation of topics and categories of problems in the infrastructure

It’s all very intuitive and easy to use, as you can see.

What can I monitor with Red Hat Insights?

Insights is delivered as Software-as-a-Service via Red Hat Customer Portal, and integrated with CloudForms (4.0+) and Satellite (5.7, 6.1+)
Supported Platforms:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 and higher, RHEL 7 and higher
• Red Hat OpenStack 7 and higher
• Red Hat Virtualization 4 and higher
• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
• Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 6 and higher, and Cloud Suite 6 and higher (included in RHCI/RHCS SKU’s)

One of the great features of Red Hat Insights is that there is no new infrastructure to manage, and also provides Ansible Tower integration which enables playbooks generated in Red Hat Insights to be automatically imported into Ansible Tower.

In the next blog post, I will give you some insights on insights, how data is collected, what data is collected, how you can control it... so stay tuned!

Wanna know more?? Find more info here