Chapter 6. Sending reports to the Hybrid Cloud Console

After you run a scan, you can send reports for that scan to the Hybrid Cloud Console at cloud.redhat.com. The report that you generate and send is not a details report or a deployments report. Instead, it is a third type of report known as an insights report. This type of report is formatted especially for ingestion by the Hybrid Cloud Console services.

When you send insights reports to the Hybrid Cloud Console, the report data can be ingested and used by Hybrid Cloud Console services, such as the inventory service of Red Hat Insights to display host-based inventory data and the subscriptions service to display subscription usage data.

Learn more

To learn more about how to work with insights reports, see the following information:

To learn more about insights reports concepts, see the following information:

6.1. Downloading and sending insights reports to the Hybrid Cloud Console

When you need to provide report data to the Hybrid Cloud Console services such as the Red Hat Insights inventory service and the subscriptions service, you download and send an insights report.

This type of report is different from a details report or a deployments report. An insights report is a Discovery report with data that is similar to the deployments report, but its contents and format are designed especially to be ingested and used by the Hybrid Cloud Console services. In addition, the insights report cannot be created from the Discovery graphical user interface. It must be created by using the Discovery command line interface.

Prerequisites

If you want to download and send an insights report, you must meet the following requirements:

  • The most recent scan job for that scan must have completed successfully.
  • The Discovery command line interface must be installed on the same system as the Discovery server so that you can run the following procedure from the command line interface. You cannot download and send an insights report from the graphical user interface.

Procedure

  1. Log in to the command line interface, where server_administrator_username is the username for the Discovery server administrator and server_administrator_password is the password for the server administrator: 

    $ dsc server login --username server_administrator_username --password server_administrator_password

  2. Find the report_identifier (report ID) value for the scan job that you want to use to create an insights report. The following command returns the summary details for all created scan objects: 

    $ dsc scan list
    Note

    If you know the name of the scan that you want to use, but do not know the report_identifier value, you can also use the qpc scan show --name scan_name command to show the scan jobs for that scan only.

  3. Using the report_identifier value that you located, download the insights report for the scan job. In the following example command, the file name assigned to the downloaded report is report.tar.gz but you can change this filename as needed: 

    $ dsc report insights --report report_identifier --output-file report.tar.gz

  4. Add the credentials that you use to log in to the Hybrid Cloud Console, generally your Red Hat Customer Portal account, to the command line interface configuration. This step is needed so that these credentials can be used in the next step to send the insights report to the Hybrid Cloud Console. 

    $ dsc insights login --username hcc_username --password

  5. Use the publish subcommand to send the insights report data to the Hybrid Cloud Console and the services that can consume the reports, such as the inventory service and the subscriptions service. 

    $ dsc insights publish --input-file report.tar.gz
Note

While you can view the output of insights reports, the Discovery documentation does not provide any information to help you interpret insights report results. In addition, although Red Hat Support can provide some basic assistance related to the installation and use of Discovery, the support team does not provide any assistance to help you understand the insights reports. The insights reports and their format are designed to be used by Red Hat internal processes, such as providing data to various Hybrid Cloud Console services.

Additional resources

6.2. What is an insights report?

After you run a scan on your IT infrastructure or parts of your IT infrastructure, you can use Discovery to create an insights report with the data from the scan. The insights report is a specialized report that is intended to be sent to Hybrid Cloud Console services, such as the inventory service of Red Hat Insights to display host-based inventory data and the subscriptions service to display subscription usage data.

Although Discovery is useful for scanning and reporting on all parts of your IT infrastructure, both connected and disconnected, the ability to send an insights report to the Hybrid Cloud Console services is particularly useful if parts of your IT infrastructure are disconnected, or air-gapped. By using Discovery to gather data about those parts of your network, you can get a more complete and more curated view of your overall network. When the data from an insights report is combined with the other data collection from the tools that support the Hybrid Cloud Console, it enables you to see a unified inventory and a complete picture of subscription usage in a single place, the Hybrid Cloud Console.

6.2.1. Frequency of reporting

All disconnected or air-gapped systems must be periodically scanned and reported through an insights report to ensure that accurate data is reaching the Hybrid Cloud Console. A weekly cadence of sending an insights report is the current recommendation. A weekly cadence provides sufficient milestones for effectively monitoring subscription usage in the subscriptions service.

6.2.2. Avoiding system duplication

Depending on the type of data that you are providing in the insights report, the masking of data can interfere with the quality of that report, especially for the deduplication and merge processes of report creation.

For example, if the insights report contains data for both connected and disconnected parts of your IT infrastructure, and you are masking data in that report, connected systems that are also being reported through other methods such as Red Hat Satellite or Red Hat Insights will be duplicated. Therefore, if you already have systems that are being reported directly through Red Hat Insights, Satellite, Red Hat Subscription Management, or similar tools, you should avoid masking hostnames, IP addresses, and similar facts that help differentiate systems when you generate an insights report.

In general, for scans that cover only disconnected parts of your IT infrastructure, or scans for 100% disconnected customers, masking is an optional step if consistent hash values are used. However, masking is not recommended. Because masking eliminates the type of information that is used to help distinguish individual systems, the use of masking prevents you from gaining the majority of benefits that are provided by Red Hat Insights and other Hybrid Cloud Console tools such as the subscriptions service.