Data Gathered and Used by Red Hat's subscription services

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

Red Hat Satellite 6.5 and later
subscription-manager
Insights Client

Issue

Description and definition of data gathered by the Satellite Inventory Plugin and our OS-level agents, used to power the subscriptions service (Subscription Watch)

Resolution

Subscription Watch uses data in three ways:

  1. To make sure that we count inventory only once. Some data is for deduplication, both primary and secondary.
  2. To link data submissions to the proper account and to log how and from what we received the data. Some quality control data is included.
  3. To calculate subscription values. Some data indicates the presence of Red Hat software and powers the usage portion of Subscription Watch.

Insights Client
The Insights Client is highly configurable in what it gathers and reports. To tailor information prepared by Insights Client, please see System Information Collected by Red Hat Insights.

Satellite Inventory Plugin
The Satellite Inventory Plugin gathers the following data, aligned with the reason for and use of the data:

Deduplication

  • Primary
    • Subscription manager id
    • DMI UUID
    • Hypervisor Virt-UUID
  • Secondary
    • Fully Qualified Domain name
    • Hostname
    • All IP Addresses
    • All MAC Addresses

Routing, Logging, and Quality Control

  • Routing
    • Red Hat Account number
  • QA
    • Satellite ID
    • Satellite Version
    • BIOS Vendor
    • BIOS Release Date
    • BIOS Version
    • Presence of Katello Agent

Subscription Pertinent Information

  • vCPU count (hyper-threading inclusive)
  • CPU Socket Count
  • CPU Core Count
  • Installed RAM
  • OS distribution release name
  • OS distribution version
  • CPU Architecture
  • System Role
  • System Usage
  • Red Hat Product IDs
  • RPM Package Manifest
  • Hypervisor node name
  • CPU flags

A sample formatting of this data, organized for ingestion by Subscription Watch, is found in the service definition. An account of ALL possible values that can be stored in the Insights Inventory Service (even those not used by Subscription Watch) can be found in the API specification

subscription-manager

The subscription-manager command gathers the following classes of data for the purposes of systems management and usage reporting.

  • Facts gathered by subscription-manager
    • Core facts
    • Subscription manager id
    • DMI UUID
    • Fully Qualified Domain name
    • Hostname
    • All IP Addresses
    • All MAC Addresses
    • Red Hat Account number
    • BIOS Vendor
    • BIOS Release Date
    • BIOS Version
    • Subscription Pertinent Facts
    • cloud instance metadata (on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud)
      • Which cloud is the system running on?
      • cloud instance type
      • cloud provider account number
    • vCPU count (hyper-threading inclusive)
    • CPU Socket Count
    • CPU Core Count
    • Installed RAM
    • OS distribution release name
    • OS distribution version
    • CPU Architecture
    • System Role
    • System Usage
    • Red Hat Product Installation metadata
      • Red Hat Product Certificates
      • Installation fingerprints for Red Hat Enterprise Linux capabilities:
      • the imagebuilder service
      • the upgrades service
      • convert2RHEL
    • RPM Package Manifest
    • enabled RPM modules
    • enabled Red Hat repositories
    • CPU flags

Root Cause

The character of this data was unclear to customers.

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