Generating Advisor Service Reports

Red Hat Insights 2023

Share reporting from advisor about the conditions affecting your RHEL infrastructure.

Red Hat Customer Content Services

Abstract

The advisor service provides several ways to download and share reporting.
Red Hat is committed to replacing problematic language in our code, documentation, and web properties. We are beginning with these four terms: master, slave, blacklist, and whitelist. Because of the enormity of this endeavor, these changes will be implemented gradually over several upcoming releases. For more details, see our CTO Chris Wright's message.

Chapter 1. Overview of Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux advisor service reporting

The advisor service enables the following ways to share the status of your Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) infrastructure:

  • Export and download a report in CSV, JSON, or YAML file format showing recommendations for your impacted RHEL systems, and share the information with strategic stakeholders.
  • Subscribe to the advisor Weekly Report email to receive a brief summary of the health of your RHEL environment.
  • Download an executive report to share a high level overview of your infrastructure with an executive audience.

These methods enable a quick and easily accessible way for you or other stakeholders to assess the health of your infrastructure and plan or act accordingly.

Chapter 2. Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux advisor service data export

Users of the advisor service can export a report in either JSON or CSV format that shows the recommendations impacting each of your registered systems. Exported reports include the following information:

  • Host name
  • Inventory UUID for the host
  • RHEL version
  • Date and time of the last data upload from this host to Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
  • Title of the recommendation impacting the host
  • Link to the solution for this recommendation
  • Total risk posed by this recommendation (from 1 to 4; 1 means low risk, 4 means high risk)
  • Likelihood of this recommendation being active on your registered systems (from 1 to 4 = 1 means unlikely; 4 means highly probable)
  • Date this recommendation was published
  • Link to the scan results for this host

2.1. Exporting reports using the advisor service

To export a report using the advisor service, complete the following steps:

  1. Navigate to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux > Advisor > Recommendations page and log in if necessary.
  2. Apply filters as needed to refine results.
  3. Click the Download icon located to the right of the Search box in the toolbar.
  4. Select either Export to CSV or Export to JSON depending on your preference.
  5. In the dialog box, select Open with and specify an application with which to open the file, or click Save File and click OK.

2.2. Exporting advisor service data using the API

Use the advisor service API to export data in one of the following ways:

API documentation for all of the Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux services is available at https://cloud.redhat.com/docs/api.

Chapter 3. Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux advisor service weekly-report email subscription

The advisor service Weekly Report email provides a quick view of the health of your environment. Subscribing to the email is optional and requires that you opt in using the settings in the advisor service. The email is informative yet unobtrusive; all of the included information can be consumed at a glance.

The email is sent every Sunday night (United States Eastern Standard Time, UTC -05:00; Easter Daylight Time, UTC-4:00) to the email address associated with your individual Red Hat Customer Portal user account, allowing you to begin your week informed. When you opt in, your subscription preference will apply only to yourself, and not everyone in your organization.

The email provides the following information about systems registered to your account:

  • Number of critical rule hits in your infrastructure
  • Number of impacted systems in your infrastructure
  • Total number of recommendations impacting your infrastructure

3.1. Subscribing to the advisor service Weekly Report email

You must subscribe to the weekly email in order to receive it.

Procedure to subscribe to the Weekly Report email

Use the following procedure to subscribe to the advisor Weekly Report email.

  1. Navigate to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux > Advisor > Recommendations page and log in if necessary.

  2. Click the down arrow to the right of your name and click User preferences.

    img adv user settings

  3. Under the Email subscriptions heading, next to Insights, check the Weekly Report check box.

    img adv weekly email opt in

  4. Click Submit.

You will receive the email each Sunday night from sender, Red Hat Insights noreply@redhat.com, with the subject line, Weekly Insights summary report.

To unsubscribe, follow the procedure above and clear the Weekly Report check box.

Chapter 4. Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux advisor service executive report

You can download a high-level report summarizing the status of your infrastructure and designed for an executive audience. Executive reports are one to two-page PDF files showing the following information:

  • Identified recommendations by severity
  • Recently identified recommendations by category
  • Top three recommendations in your infrastructure based on the greatest total risk and the greatest number of systems exposed

4.1. Downloading an advisor service executive report

Use the following procedure to download an executive report from the advisor service.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux > Advisor > Recommendations page and log in if necessary.
  2. Located in the upper-right corner of the Recommendations page, click the Download executive report link.
  3. Select to open or save the file and click OK.
  4. If downloaded, check your download location for the PDF file.

Chapter 5. Enabling notifications and integrations

You can enable the notifications service on Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console to send notifications whenever the advisor service detects an issue and generates a recommendation. Using the notifications service frees you from having to continually check the Red Hat Insights for RHEL dashboard for recommendations.

For example, you can configure the notifications service to automatically send an email message whenever the advisor service generates a recommendation.

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 in other ways:

  • Using an authenticated client to query Red Hat Insights APIs for event data
  • Using webhooks to send events to third-party applications that accept inbound requests
  • Integrating notifications with applications such as Splunk to route advisor recommendations to the application dashboard

Additional resources

Providing feedback on Red Hat documentation

We appreciate your feedback on our documentation. To provide feedback, highlight text in a document and add comments.

Prerequisites

  • You are logged in to the Red Hat Customer Portal.
  • In the Red Hat Customer Portal, the document is in the Multi-page HTML viewing format.

Procedure

To provide your feedback, perform the following steps:

  1. Click the Feedback button in the top-right corner of the document to see existing feedback.

    Note

    The feedback feature is enabled only in the Multi-page HTML format.

  2. Highlight the section of the document where you want to provide feedback.

  3. Click the Add Feedback pop-up that appears near the highlighted text.

    A text box appears in the feedback section on the right side of the page.

  4. Enter your feedback in the text box and click Submit.

    A documentation issue is created.

  5. To view the issue, click the issue link in the feedback view.

Legal Notice

Copyright © 2023 Red Hat, Inc.
The text of and illustrations in this document are licensed by Red Hat under a Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 3.0 Unported license ("CC-BY-SA"). An explanation of CC-BY-SA is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/. In accordance with CC-BY-SA, if you distribute this document or an adaptation of it, you must provide the URL for the original version.
Red Hat, as the licensor of this document, waives the right to enforce, and agrees not to assert, Section 4d of CC-BY-SA to the fullest extent permitted by applicable law.
Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Shadowman logo, the Red Hat logo, JBoss, OpenShift, Fedora, the Infinity logo, and RHCE are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the United States and other countries.
Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the United States and other countries.
Java® is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
XFS® is a trademark of Silicon Graphics International Corp. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries.
MySQL® is a registered trademark of MySQL AB in the United States, the European Union and other countries.
Node.js® is an official trademark of Joyent. Red Hat is not formally related to or endorsed by the official Joyent Node.js open source or commercial project.
The OpenStack® Word Mark and OpenStack logo are either registered trademarks/service marks or trademarks/service marks of the OpenStack Foundation, in the United States and other countries and are used with the OpenStack Foundation's permission. We are not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by the OpenStack Foundation, or the OpenStack community.
All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.