Chapter 1. Patch service overview

Patch leverages Red Hat software and management automation expertise to enable consistent patch workflows for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems across the open hybrid cloud. It provides a single canonical view of applicable advisories across all of your deployments, whether they be Red Hat Satellite, hosted Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM), or the public cloud.

Use the Insights patch service to

  • see all of the applicable Red Hat and Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) advisories for your RHEL systems checking into Insights.
  • patch any system with one or more advisories by using remediation playbooks.
  • see package updates available for Red Hat and non-Red Hat repositories as of the last system checkin. Your host must be running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7, RHEL 8.6+ or RHEL 9 and it must maintain a fresh yum/dnf cache.
Note

1.1. Criteria for patch and vulnerability errata

The patch service collects a variety of data to create meaningful and actionable errata for your systems. The Insights client collects the following data on each checkin:

  • List of installed packages, including name, epoch, version, release, and architecture (NEVRA)
  • List of enabled modules (RHEL 8 and later)
  • List of enabled repositories
  • Output of yum updateinfo -C or dnf updateinfo -C
  • Release version from systems with a version lock
  • System architecture (eg. x86_64)

Additionally, Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux collects metadata from the following data sources:

  • Metadata from product repositories delivered by the Red Hat Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  • Metadata from Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repositories
  • Red Hat Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL) feed

Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux compares the set of system data to the collected errata and vulnerability metadata in order to generate a set of available updates for each system. These updates include package updates, Red Hat errata, and Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs).

Additional resources

For more information about Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), refer to the following resources:

1.2. Reviewing and filtering applicable advisories and systems in the inventory

You can see all of the applicable advisories and installed packages for systems checking into Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Procedure

  1. On Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, navigate to Content > Advisories.

  2. You can also search for advisories by name using the search box, and filter advisories by:

    1. Type - Security, Bugfix, Enhancement, Unknown
    2. Publish date - Last 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, Last year, or More than 1 year ago
  3. Navigate to Content > Patch > Systems to see a list of affected systems you can patch with applicable advisories. You can also search for specific systems using the search box.
  4. Navigate to Content > Packages to see a list of packages with updates available in your environment. You can also search for specific packages using the search box.

1.3. System patching using Insights remediation playbooks

The following steps demonstrate the patching workflow from the Content > Advisories page in Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux:

Procedure

  1. On Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, navigate to Content > Advisories.
  2. Click the advisory you want to apply to affected systems. You will see a description of the advisory, a link to view packages and errata at access.redhat.com, and a list of affected systems. The total number of applicable advisories of each type (Security, Bugfix, Enhancement) against each system are also displayed.
  3. Select the system(s) for which you want to create a playbook, then click Remediate.
  4. You can choose to modify an existing Playbook or create a new one. Accordingly, select Existing Playbook and the playbook name from the drop-down list, then click Next. Or, select Create new Playbook and enter a name for your playbook, then click Next.
  5. On the left navigation, click on Remediations.
  6. Click on the playbook name to see the playbook details, or simply select and click Download playbook.

1.4. Updating errata for systems managed by Red Hat Satellite

Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux calculates applicable updates based on the packages, repositories, and modules that a system reports when it checks in. Insights combines these results with a client-side evaluation, and stores the resulting superset of updates as applicable updates.

A system check-in to Red Hat Insights includes the following content-related data:

  • Installed packages
  • Enabled repositories
  • Enabled modules
  • List of updates, which the client determines using the dnf updateinfo -C command. This command primarily captures package updates for non-Red Hat repositories

Insights uses this collection of data to calculate applicable updates for the system.

Sometimes Insights calculates applicable updates for systems managed by Red Hat Satellite and reports inaccurate results. This issue can manifest in two ways:

  • Insights shows installable updates that cannot be installed on the Satellite-managed system.
  • Insights shows applicable updates that match what can be installed on the system immediately after patching, but shows outdated or missing updates a day or two later. This can occur when the system is subscribed to RHEL repositories that have been renamed.

Insights now provides an optional check-in command to provide accurate reporting for applicable updates on Satellite-managed systems. This option rebuilds the yum/dnf package caches and creates a refreshed list of applicable updates for the system.

Note

Satellite-managed systems are not eligible to have Red Hat Insights content templates applied.

Prerequisites

  • Admin-level access to the system

Procedure

  • To rebuild the package caches from the command line, enter the following command: 

    # insights-client --build-packagecache

The command regenerates the dnf/yum caches and collects the relevant installable errata from Satellite. insights-client then generates a refreshed list of updates and sends it to Insights.

Note

The generated list of updates is equivalent to the output from the command dnf updateinfo list.

1.4.1. Configuring automatic check-in for insights-client

You can edit the insights-client configuration file on your system (/etc/insights-client/insights-client.conf) to rebuild the package caches automatically each time the system checks in to Insights.

Procedure

  1. Open the /etc/insights-client/insights-client.conf file in a text editor.

  2. Look in the file for the following comment: 

    #Set build_packagecache=True to refresh the yum/dnf cache during the insights-client check-in

  3. Add the following line after the comment: 

    build_packagecache=True
  4. Save your edits and exit the editor.

When the system next checks in to Satellite, insights-client executes a yum/dnf cache refresh before collecting the output of the client-side evaluation. Insights then reports the client-side evaluation output as installable updates. The evaluation output, based on what has been published to the CDN, is reported as applicable updates.

Additional resources

1.5. Enabling notifications and integrations

You can enable the notifications service on Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console to send notifications whenever the patch service detects an issue and generates an advisory. Using the notifications service frees you from having to continually check the Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux dashboard for advisories.

For example, you can configure the notifications service to automatically send an email message whenever the patch service generates an advisory.

Enabling the notifications service requires three main steps:

  • First, an Organization Administrator creates a User Access group with the Notifications-administrator role, and then adds account members to the group.
  • Next, a Notifications administrator sets up behavior groups for events in the notifications service. Behavior groups specify the delivery method for each notification. For example, a behavior group can specify whether email notifications are sent to all users, or just to Organization Administrators.
  • Finally, users who receive email notifications from events must set their user preferences so that they receive individual emails for each event.

In addition to sending email messages, you can configure the notifications service to send event data using an authenticated client to query Red Hat Insights APIs.

Additional resources