Monitoring hosts using Red Hat Insights

You can use Insights to diagnose systems and downtime related to security exploits, performance degradation, and stability failures. You can use the Insights dashboard to quickly identify key risks to stability, security, and performance. You can sort by category, view details of the impact and resolution, and then determine what systems are affected.

To use Insights to monitor hosts that you manage with orcharhino, you must first install Insights on your hosts and register your hosts with Insights.

For new orcharhino hosts, you can install and configure Insights during host registration to orcharhino. For more information, see Registering Hosts by Using Global Registration.

For hosts already registered to orcharhino, you can install and configure Insights on your hosts by using an Ansible role. For more information, see deploying red hat insights using the ansible role.

Additional information

  • To view the logs for all plug-ins, go to /var/log/foreman/production.log.

  • If you have problems connecting to Insights, ensure that your certificates are up-to-date. Refresh your subscription manifest to update your certificates.

  • You can change the default schedule for running insights-client by configuring insights-client.timer on a host.

Installing Red Hat Cloud plug-in

Install the Red Hat Cloud plug-in to generate and upload reports from orcharhino to your Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console.

Procedure

  1. Install the Red Hat Cloud plug-in on your orcharhino Server:

    $ orcharhino-installer --enable-foreman-plugin-rh-cloud

  2. Optional: In the orcharhino management UI, navigate to Administer > About and select the Plugins tab to verify the installation of the Red Hat Cloud plug-in.

Access to information from Insights in orcharhino

You can access the additional information available for hosts from Red Hat Insights in the following places in the orcharhino management UI:

  • Navigate to Configure > Insights where the vertical ellipsis next to the Remediate button provides a View in Red Hat Insights link to the general recommendations page. On each recommendation line, the vertical ellipsis provides a View in Red Hat Insights link to the recommendation rule, and, if one is available for that recommendation, a Knowledgebase article link.

  • For additional information, navigate to Hosts > All Hosts. If the host has recommendations listed, click on the number of recommendations. On the Insights tab, the vertical ellipsis next to the Remediate button provides a Go To orcharhino Insights page link to information for the system, and a View in Red Hat Insights link to host details on the console.

Excluding hosts from rh-cloud and insights-client reports

You can set the host_registration_insights parameter to False to omit rh-cloud and insights-client reports. orcharhino will exclude the hosts from rh-cloud reports and block insights-client from uploading a report to the cloud.

Use the following procedure to change the value of host_registration_insights parameter:

Procedure

  1. In the orcharhino management UI, navigate to Host > All Hosts.

  2. Select any host for which you want to change the value.

  3. On the Parameters tab, click on the edit button of host_registration_insights.

  4. Set the value to False.

This parameter can also be set at the organization, hostgroup, subnet, and domain level. Also, it automatically prevents new reports from being uploaded as long as they are associated with the entity.

If you set the parameter to false on a host that is already reported on the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, it will be still removed automatically from the inventory. However, this process can take some time to complete.

Deploying Red Hat Insights using the Ansible role

The RedHatInsights.insights-client Ansible role is used to automate the installation and registration of hosts with Insights. For more information about adding this role to your orcharhino, see Getting Started with Ansible in orcharhino in Managing Hosts using Ansible.

Procedure

  1. Add the RedHatInsights.insights-client role to the hosts.

    For new hosts, see Creating a Host.

    For existing hosts, see Using Ansible Roles to Automate Repetitive Tasks on Clients in Managing Hosts using Ansible.

  2. To run the RedHatInsights.insights-client role on your host, navigate to Hosts > All Hosts and click the name of the host that you want to use.

  3. On the host details page, expand the Schedule a job dropdown menu.

  4. Click Run Ansible roles.

Configuring synchronization of Insights recommendations for hosts

You can enable automatic synchronization of the recommendations from Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console that occurs daily by default. If you leave the setting disabled, you can synchronize the recommendations manually.

Procedures

  • To get the recommendations automatically:

    1. In the orcharhino management UI, navigate to Configure > Insights.

    2. Enable Sync Automatically.

  • To get the recommendations manually:

    1. In the orcharhino management UI, navigate to Configure > Insights.

    2. On the vertical ellipsis, click Sync Recommendations.

Configuring automatic removal of hosts from the Insights Inventory

When hosts are removed from orcharhino, they can also be removed from the inventory of Red Hat Insights, either automatically or manually. You can configure automatic removal of hosts from the Insights Inventory during Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console synchronization with orcharhino that occurs daily by default. If you leave the setting disabled, you can still remove the bulk of hosts from the Inventory manually.

Prerequisites

  • Your user account must have the permission of view_foreman_rh_cloud to view the Inventory Upload page in orcharhino management UI.

Procedure

  1. In the orcharhino management UI, navigate to Configure > Inventory Upload.

  2. Enable the Automatic Mismatch Deletion setting.

Creating an Insights remediation plan for hosts

With orcharhino, you can create a Red Hat Insights remediation plan and run the plan on orcharhino hosts.

Procedure

  1. In the orcharhino management UI, navigate to Configure > Insights.

  2. On the Red Hat Insights page, select the number of recommendations that you want to include in an Insights plan.

    You can only select the recommendations that have an associated playbook.

  3. Click Remediate.

  4. In the Remediation Summary window, you can select the Resolutions to apply. Use the Filter field to search for specific keywords.

  5. Click Remediate.

  6. In the Job Invocation page, do not change the contents of precompleted fields.

  7. Optional. For more advanced configuration of the Remote Execution Job, click Show Advanced Fields.

  8. Select the Type of query you require.

  9. Select the Schedule you require.

  10. Click Submit.

Alternatively:

  1. In the orcharhino management UI, navigate to Hosts > All Hosts.

  2. Select a host.

  3. On the Host details page, click Recommendations.

  4. On the Red Hat Insights page, select the number of recommendations you want to include in an Insights plan and proceed as before.

In the Jobs window, you can view the progress of your plan.

The text and illustrations on this page are licensed by ATIX AG under a Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 3.0 Unported ("CC-BY-SA") license. This page also contains text from the official Foreman documentation which uses the same license ("CC-BY-SA").