Chapter 14. Monitoring Resources

The following chapter details how to configure monitoring and reporting for managed systems. This includes host configuration, content views, compliance, subscriptions, registered hosts, promotions and synchronization.

14.1. Using the Red Hat Satellite Content Dashboard

The Red Hat Satellite content dashboard contains various widgets which provide an overview of the host configuration, Content Views, compliance reports, subscriptions and hosts currently registered, promotions and synchronization, and a list of the latest notifications.

Navigate to Monitor > Dashboard to access the content dashboard. The dashboard can be rearranged by clicking on a widget and dragging it to a different position. The following widgets are available:

Host Configuration Status

An overview of the configuration states and the number of hosts associated with it during the last reporting interval. The following table shows the descriptions of the possible configuration states.

Table 14.1. Host Configuration States

IconStateDescription

1

Hosts that had performed modifications without error

Host that successfully performed modifications during the last reporting interval.

2

Hosts in error state

Hosts on which an error was detected during the last reporting interval.

3

Good host reports in the last 35 minutes

Hosts without error that did not perform any modifications in the last 35 minutes.

4

Hosts that had pending changes

Hosts on which some resources would be applied but Puppet was configured to run in the noop mode.

5

Out of sync hosts

Hosts that were not synchronized and the report was not received during the last reporting interval.

6

Hosts with no reports

Hosts for which no reports were collected during the last reporting interval.

7

Hosts with alerts disabled

Hosts which are not being monitored.

Click the particular configuration status to view hosts associated with it.

Host Configuration Chart
A pie chart shows the proportion of the configuration status and the percentage of all hosts associated with it.
Latest Events

A list of messages produced by hosts including administration information, product and subscription changes, and any errors.

Monitor this section for global notifications sent to all users and to detect any unusual activity or errors.

Run Distribution (last 30 minutes)
A graph shows the distribution of the running Puppet agents during the last puppet interval which is 30 minutes by default. In this case, each column represents a number of reports received from clients during 3 minutes.
New Hosts
A list of the recently created hosts. Click the host for more details.
Task Status
A summary of all current tasks, grouped by their state and result. Click the number to see the list of corresponding tasks.
Latest Warning/Error Tasks
A list of the latest tasks that have been stopped due to a warning or error. Click a task to see more details.
Discovered Hosts
A list of all bare-metal hosts detected on the provisioning network by the Discovery plug-in.
Latest Errata
A list of all errata available for hosts registered to Satellite.
Content Views
A list of all Content Views in Satellite and their publish status.
Sync Overview
An overview of all products or repositories enabled in Satellite and their synchronization status. All products that are in the queue for synchronization, are unsynchronized or have been previously synchronized are listed in this section.
Host Subscription Status

An overview of the subscriptions currently consumed by the hosts registered to Satellite. A subscription is a purchased certificate that unlocks access to software, upgrades, and security fixes for hosts. The following table shows the possible states of subscriptions.

Table 14.2. Host Subscription States

IconStateDescription

1229

Invalid

Hosts that have products installed, but are not correctly subscribed. These hosts need attention immediately.

1230

Partial

Hosts that have a subscription and a valid entitlement, but are not using their full entitlements. These hosts should be monitored to ensure they are configured as expected.

1228

Valid

Hosts that have a valid entitlement and are using their full entitlements.

Click the subscription type to view hosts associated with subscriptions of the selected type.

Subscription Status
An overview of the current subscription totals that shows the number of active subscriptions, the number of subscriptions that expire in the next 120 days, and the number of subscriptions that have recently expired.
Host Collections
A list of all host collections in Satellite and their status, including the number of content hosts in each host collection.
Virt-who Configuration Status

An overview of the status of reports received from the virt-who daemon running on hosts in the environment. The following table shows the possible states.

Table 14.3. Virt-who Configuration States

StateDescription

No Reports

No report has been received because either an error occurred during the virt-who configuration deployment, or the configuration has not been deployed yet, or virt-who cannot connect to Foreman during the scheduled interval.

No Change

No report has been received because hypervisor did not detect any changes on the virtual machines, or virt-who failed to upload the reports during the scheduled interval. If you added a virtual machine but the configuration is in the No Change state, check that virt-who is running.

OK

The report has been received without any errors during the scheduled interval.

Total Configurations

A total number of virt-who configurations.

Click the configuration status to see all configurations in this state.

The widget also lists the three latest configurations in the No Change state under Latest Configurations Without Change.

Latest Compliance Reports
A list of the latest compliance reports. Each compliance report shows a number of rules passed (P), failed (F), or othered (O). Click the host for the detailed compliance report. Click the policy for more details on that policy.
Compliance Reports Breakdown
A pie chart shows the distribution of compliance reports according to their status.
Red Hat Insights Actions
Red Hat Insights is a tool embedded in Satellite that checks the environment and suggests actions you can take. The actions are divided into 4 categories: Availability, Stability, Performance, and Security.
Red Hat Insights Risk Summary

A table shows the distribution of the actions according to the risk levels. Risk level represents how critical the action is and how likely it is to cause an actual issue. The possible risk levels are: Low, Medium, High, and Critical.

Note

It is not possible to change the date format displayed in the Satellite web UI.

14.1.1. Managing Tasks

Red Hat Satellite keeps a complete log of all planned or performed tasks, such as repositories synchronised, errata applied, and Content Views published. To review the log, navigate to Monitor > Tasks.

In the Task window, you can search for specific tasks, view their status, details, and elapsed time since they started. You can also cancel and resume one or more tasks.

The tasks are managed using the Dynflow engine. Remote tasks have a timeout which can be adjusted as needed.

To Adjust Timeout Settings:

  1. Navigate to Administer > Settings.
  2. Enter %_timeout in the search box and click Search. The search should return four settings, including a description.
  3. In the Value column, click the icon next to a number to edit it.
  4. Enter the desired value in seconds, and click Save.
Note

Adjusting the %_finish_timeout values might help in case of low bandwidth. Adjusting the %_accept_timeout values might help in case of high latency.

When a task is initialized, any back-end service that will be used in the task, such as Candlepin or Pulp, will be checked for correct functioning. If the check fails, you will receive an error similar to the following one:

There was an issue with the backend service candlepin: Connection refused – connect(2).

If the back-end service checking feature turns out to be causing any trouble, it can be disabled as follows.

To Disable Checking for Services:

  1. Navigate to Administer > Settings.
  2. Enter check_services_before_actions in the search box and click Search.
  3. In the Value column, click the icon to edit the value.
  4. From the drop-down menu, select false.
  5. Click Save.

14.2. Configuring RSS Notifications

To view Satellite event notification alerts, click the Notifications icon in the upper right of the screen.

By default, the Notifications area displays RSS feed events published in the Red Hat Satellite Blog.

The feed is refreshed every 12 hours and the Notifications area is updated whenever new events become available.

You can configure the RSS feed notifications by changing the URL feed. The supported feed format is RSS 2.0 and Atom. For an example of the RSS 2.0 feed structure, see the Red Hat Satellite Blog feed. For an example of the Atom feed structure, see the Foreman blog feed.

To Configure RSS Feed Notifications:

  1. Navigate to Administer > Settings and select the Notifications tab.
  2. In the RSS URL row, click the edit icon in the Value column and type the required URL.
  3. In the RSS enable row, click the edit icon in the Value column to enable or disable this feature.

14.3. Monitoring Satellite Server

From the About page in the Satellite Server web UI, you can find an overview of the following:

  • System Status, including Capsules, Available Providers, Compute Resources, and Plug-ins
  • Support information
  • System Information
  • Backend System Status
  • Installed packages

To navigate to the About page:

  • In the upper right corner of the Satellite Server web UI, click Administer > About.
Note

After Pulp failure, the status of Pulp might show OK instead of Error for up to 10 minutes due to synchronization delay.

14.4. Monitoring Capsule Server

The following section shows how to use the Satellite web UI to find Capsule information valuable for maintenance and troubleshooting.

14.4.1. Viewing General Capsule Information

Navigate to Infrastructure > Capsules to view a table of Capsule Servers registered to the Satellite Server. The information contained in the table answers the following questions:

Is the Capsule Server running?
This is indicated by a green icon in the Status column. A red icon indicates an inactive Capsule, use the service foreman-proxy restart command on the Capsule Server to activate it.
What services are enabled on the Capsule Server?
In the Features column you can verify if the Capsule for example provides a DHCP service or acts as a Pulp node. Capsule features can be enabled during installation or configured in addition. For more information, see Installing Capsule Server.
What organizations and locations is the Capsule Server assigned to?

A Capsule Server can be assigned to multiple organizations and locations, but only Capsules belonging to the currently selected organization are displayed. To list all Capsules, select Any Organization from the context menu in the top left corner.

After changing the Capsule configuration, select Refresh from the drop-down menu in the Actions column to make sure the Capsule table is up to date.

Click the Capsule name to view further details. At the Overview tab, you can find the same information as in the Capsule table. In addition, you can answer to the following questions:

Which hosts are managed by the Capsule Server?
The number of associated hosts is displayed next to the Hosts managed label. Click the number to view the details of associated hosts.
How much storage space is available on the Capsule Server?
The amount of storage space occupied by the Pulp content in /var/lib/pulp, /var/lib/pulp/content, and /var/lib/mongodb is displayed. Also the remaining storage space available on the Capsule can be ascertained.

14.4.2. Monitoring Services

Navigate to Infrastructure > Capsules and click the name of the selected Capsule. At the Services tab, you can find basic information on Capsule services, such as the list of DNS domains, or the number of Pulp workers. The appearance of the page depends on what services are enabled on the Capsule Server. Services providing more detailed status information can have dedicated tabs at the Capsule page (see Section 14.4.3, “Monitoring Puppet”).

14.4.3. Monitoring Puppet

Navigate to Infrastructure > Capsules and click the name of the selected Capsule. At the Puppet tab you can find the following:

  • A summary of Puppet events, an overview of latest Puppet runs, and the synchronization status of associated hosts at the General sub-tab.
  • A list of Puppet environments at the Environments sub-tab.

At the Puppet CA tab you can find the following:

  • A certificate status overview and the number of autosign entries at the General sub-tab.
  • A table of CA certificates associated with the Capsule at the Certificates sub-tab. Here you can inspect the certificate expiry data, or cancel the certificate by clicking Revoke.
  • A list of autosign entries at the Autosign entries sub-tab. Here you can create an entry by clicking New or delete one by clicking Delete.