Chapter 2. Advisor-service recommendations overview

The advisor service bundles information about known configuration issues that might negatively affect the availability, stability, performance, or security of your RHEL systems. This information bundle is used to create recommendations about how you can fix or remediate issues on your systems. (A recommendation was formerly called a rule in Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.) Recommendations are published to the advisor service database, and can be accessed through the advisor recommendations page.

When you navigate to the recommendations page you can use various sort and filter methods to access information such as:

  • Modified. Shows the date or time frame when a recommendation was last modified (or published) to the advisor service database.
  • Category. Shows the type of issue or what the issue affects—​whether the issue has the potential to negatively affect the availability, stability, performance, or security of RHEL systems.
  • Impact. Shows the impact (Low, Medium, High or Critical) on system operations if an incident related to the recommendation were to happen.
  • Incidents. Shows the issue has been classified as an incident and is an issue that is already affecting your systems.
  • Likelihood. Shows the likelihood (Low, Medium, High or Critical) that the issue will negatively affect your infrastructure.
  • Name. Shows a brief description of the issue, including how it affects RHEL systems.
  • Reboot Required. Shows whether a system reboot is required (Required or Not Required) as part of remediation steps.
  • Remediation. Shows if the fix or remediation requires manual steps or has an automated playbook.
  • Risk of change. Shows the risk of change (Very Low, Low, Moderate, or Important) for systems if a remediation is executed.
  • Status. Describes a recommendation’s status. (All, Enabled, Disabled, or Red Hat disabled).

    • All. Shows results for all status options.
    • Enabled and Disabled. Show business-critical recommendations that are visible, or not visible. A disabled recommendation indicates that someone in your organization turned the visibility of a recommendation off.
    • Red Hat disabled. Shows recommendations that Red Hat makes available for you to enable when you are performing specific actions, like upgrading Red Hat Enterprise Linux major versions.
  • Systems or Systems impacted. Shows the number of systems (1 or more or None) on which a recommendation is detected. 1 or more systems shows one or more systems that have recommendations. None Shows systems that do not have recommendations.
  • Total risk. Describes total risk level (Low, Moderate, Important, or Critical), which is determined by the likelihood that the issue will negatively affect your infrastructure, and the impact on system operations if that were to happen.

The default advisor service recommendations view shows a smaller subset of information. The information is filtered to show recommendation information for one or more systems. These recommendations have a status of Enabled. For information about using filters, see Filtering advisor-service recommendations.

2.1. System and recommendation pairing

When a recommendation exists on a system, the advisor service identifies whether, and how, the system has been impacted and provides specific mitigation or resolution instructions. This information is visible when viewing a recommendation and then selecting an affected system.

After selecting an affected system, view all recommendations available for the system along with the following information:

  • Detected issues. Specific information about the fault on that system
  • Steps to resolve. Steps to resolve the issue on that system
  • Related knowledgebase articles. KB articles or solutions about the general issue
  • Additional info. Other support articles on the issue or solutions for resolution
  • Ansible. Playbook remediation availability

2.2. Recommendation impact date

A system is said to be impacted by a recommendation when the conditions described in that recommendation exist on the system. The advisor service informs users of when a system first became impacted by a recommendation.

You can apply the Systems impacted primary filter to the list of recommendations, and select the 1 or more secondary filter to show only recommendations impacting systems. By clicking on a recommendation from the filtered list, you can see when that recommendation first impacted each of the systems on the list.

This information can be viewed in the First impacted column on the following pages in the advisor service web console:

  • On the Recommendations list for a single system, for each recommendation where applicable.
  • In the details view of a single recommendation, Affected systems list, for each system impacted by that recommendation.