Show Table of Contents
2.2. Customer Portal Subscription Management
The ultimate goal of entitlement management is to allow administrators to identify the relationship between their systems and the subscriptions used by those systems. This can be done from two different perspectives: from the perspective of the local system looking externally to potential subscriptions and from the perspective of the organization, looking down at the total infrastructure of systems and all subscriptions.
The Red Hat Subscription Manager UI and CLI are both local clients which manage only the local machine. These tools are somewhat limited in their view; they only disclose information (such as available entitlements) from the perspective of that one system, so expired subscriptions, subscriptions with no available quantity, or subscriptions for other architectures are not displayed.
Customer Portal Subscription Management is a global tool which is intended to give complete, organization-wide views into subscriptions and systems. It shows all subscriptions and all consumers for the entire organization. Customer Portal Subscription Management can perform many of the tasks of the local tools, like registering consumers, attachingubscriptions, and viewing system facts and UUID. It can also manage the subscriptions themselves, such as viewing contract information and renewing subscriptions — a task not possible in the local clients.
Figure 4. RHN Subscription Management in the Customer Portal
Note
Customer Portal Subscription Management gives a global view of all consumers, of all types, for an organization, which is crucial for planning and effectively attaching subscriptions. However, it does not provide any insight into what specific products are installed on a system and whether subscriptions are attached for those products. The Portal only gives an overall status for a system.
To track the individual status of installed products, you must use the local Subscription Manager tools.
Customer Portal Subscription Management also provides a view of systems and subscriptions managed under RHN Classic and provides access to the RHN Classic web tools.
All of the subscriptions for an entire organization — the subscriptions that have been purchased and the systems to which they have been allocated — are viewable through the account pages at https://access.redhat.com/. Additional information about Customer Portal Subscription Management is available in Using the Customer Portal to Manage Subscriptions at https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/Red_Hat_Subscription_Management/.
Where did the comment section go?
Red Hat's documentation publication system recently went through an upgrade to enable speedier, more mobile-friendly content. We decided to re-evaluate our commenting platform to ensure that it meets your expectations and serves as an optimal feedback mechanism. During this redesign, we invite your input on providing feedback on Red Hat documentation via the discussion platform.