Chapter 3. What does subscription watch track?

Subscription watch currently tracks the following products:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Tracks RHEL on physical systems, virtual systems, and public cloud. If your RHEL installations predate certificate-based subscription management, subscription watch will not track that inventory.

  • Tracks physical RHEL usage in CPU sockets, organized by architecture and variants for x86.
  • Tracks virtualized RHEL by installed socket count for standard guest subscriptions and by socket count of the hypervisor host node for virtual data center (VDC) subscriptions.
  • Tracks public cloud RHEL usage in sockets, where one instance equals one socket.
Red Hat OpenShift

Tracks Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform usage in CPU cores or sockets for clusters and aggregates this data into an account view, as refined by the following version support:

  • RHOCP 4.1 and later with Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS based nodes or a mixed environment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS and RHEL based nodes

    Note

    Socket-based reporting for Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS nodes is available only in the most recent minor version of 4.2 or later versions.

  • RHOCP 3.11

For RHOCP subscription usage, there was a change in reporting models between the major 3 and 4 versions, where version 3 usage is considered at the node level and version 4 usage is considered at the account level. While the subscription management process for version 3 era subscriptions is still done at the node level, the data is tabulated and displayed in subscription watch in an account-level view.

The difference in reporting models for the RHOCP major versions also results in some differences in how subscription watch and the associated services in the Cloud Services platform calculate usage. For RHOCP version 4, subscription watch recognizes and ignores the parts of the cluster that perform overhead tasks. These parts of the cluster are commonly called infrastructure nodes, and can include master, router, registry, metrics, logging, etcd, and similar nodes. Subscription watch recognizes and tracks only the parts of the cluster that contain compute nodes, also commonly called worker nodes.

However, for RHOCP version 3.11, the version 3 era reporting model cannot distinguish and ignore the infrastructure nodes. Therefore, for RHOCP version 3.11, you can assume that approximately 15% of the subscription data reported by subscription watch is overhead for infrastructure nodes. This percentage is based on analysis of cluster overhead in RHOCP version 3 installations.