The basics of management with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Insights

One of the older administrative guides for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) defined a philosophy of system administration, starting with automation and then going through a series of “knowing” principles — know your users, know your resources, know your business. In many ways, effective system administration requires stepping back from the endless daily maintenance tasks and patches, and getting a look at that big picture. What do your systems look like, individually? What does your infrastructure look like as a whole? And does your infrastructure match the needs of your users and your business?

This is why Red Hat Insights is both a powerful tool for RHEL administration and a hard tool to categorize. It provides some automation (though in very specific ways, and not nearly to the depth or capacity of Red Hat Ansible or Red Hat Smart Management). It provides some monitoring, but, again, only in certain areas. While Red Hat Insights provides a mix of automation, monitoring, and management, the effect is captured in the name: it provides insights. It gives system administrators that real-time, infrastructure-wide picture and lets them know and manage security, patching, configuration, and drift. In that sense, it’s not an automation tool - it’s a system administration tool.

This has broader implications for IT imperatives. Security failures, as an example, frequently come down to inconsistent policies or an inability to identify systems that need to be patched. It’s not a lack of ability, but a lack of knowledge. Consistency, repeatability, and insight can affect everything from outages and recovery time to upgrade strategy.

Red Hat Insights is provided with every active subscription of RHEL. It can provide that foundational layer for viewing and managing systems across datacenters, physical locations, and public clouds, as well as in Red Hat OpenShift. It gives that big picture view. When system administrators have that knowledge and perspective, then they are better equipped to identify and strategize other tools and processes they need, whether that’s identifying different kinds of management and deployment tools or performance monitoring or security and compliance.

Every infrastructure is a unique living thing and system administrators need to understand the unique characteristics of their own infrastructure. Those are the foundational principles of system administration: know your users, know your resources, know your business, and automate everything you can.

We have more resources around RHEL and Insights at www.engage.redhat.com/discover-more.