Chapter 12. Connecting Red Hat OpenShift to subscription watch

If you are using Red Hat OpenShift as the data collection tool, the steps you must do to connect to subscription watch depend on multiple factors. These factors include the installed version of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, whether you are working in a connected or disconnected environment, and whether you are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS, or both as the operating system for clusters.

Subscription watch is designed to work with customers who use Red Hat OpenShift 4.1 and later in connected environments. For Red Hat OpenShift version 4.1 and later, this communication is enabled through connected Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform clusters, specifically, clusters that report data to Red Hat through Telemetry. These connected clusters can communicate through Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager to supply information to the data pipeline for subscription watch.

Customers with disconnected Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.1 and later environments can use Red Hat OpenShift as a data collection tool by manually creating each cluster in Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager.

Customers who use Red Hat OpenShift 3.11 can also use subscription watch. However, for Red Hat OpenShift version 3.11, the communication with subscription watch is enabled through other tools that supply the data pipeline, such as Insights, Satellite, or Red Hat Subscription Management.

For Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.1 or later with Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS

For this profile, cluster architecture is optimized to report data to Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager through Telemetry, one of the remote monitoring tools. Therefore, setup of subscription watch reporting is essentially confirming that this monitoring tool is active.

For Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.1 or later with a mixed environment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

For this profile, data gathering is affected by the change in the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform reporting models between Red Hat OpenShift major versions 3 and 4. Version 3 relies upon RHEL to report cluster usage at the node level, and this is still the reporting model used for version 4 RHEL nodes. However, the version 4 era reporting model reports Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS usage at the cluster level through Red Hat OpenShift tools.

The tools that are used to gather this data are different. Therefore, the setup of subscription watch reporting is to confirm that both tool sets are configured correctly.

For Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform version 3.11

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform version 3.11 reports cluster usage based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux nodes in the cluster. Therefore, for this profile, subscription watch reporting uses the standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux data collection tools.