Troubleshooting Red Hat Discovery

Red Hat Discovery is an inspection and reporting tool. It is designed to find, identify, and report environment data, or facts, such as the number of physical and virtual systems on a network, their operating systems, and other configuration data. In addition, it is designed to find, identify, and report more detailed facts for some versions of key Red Hat packages and products for the IT resources in that network.

The ability to inspect the software and systems that are running on your network improves your ability to understand and report on your subscription usage. Ultimately, this inspection and reporting process is part of the larger system administration task of managing your inventories.

Red Hat Discovery requires the configuration of two basic structures to access IT resources and run the inspection process. A credential contains user access data, such as the username and password or SSH key of a user with sufficient authority to run the inspection process on a particular source or some of the assets on that source. A source contains data about a single asset or multiple assets that are to be inspected. These assets can be physical machines, virtual machines, or containers, identified as hostnames, IP addresses, IP ranges, or subnets. These assets can also be a systems management solution such as vCenter Server or Red Hat Satellite Server, or can be clusters deployed on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

You can save multiple credentials and sources to use with Discovery in various combinations as you run inspection processes, or scans. When you have completed a scan, you can access these facts in the output as a collection of formatted data, or report, to review the results.

By default, the credentials and sources that are created during the use of Red Hat Discovery are encrypted in a database. The values are encrypted with AES-256 encryption. They are decrypted when the Red Hat Discovery server runs a scan with the use of a vault password to access the encrypted values that are stored in the database.

Red Hat Discovery is an agentless inspection tool, so there is no need to install the tool on every source that is to be inspected. However, the system that Discovery is installed on must have access to the systems to be discovered and inspected.

Red Hat Discovery finds the following Red Hat products. For each version or release, the earliest version is listed, with later releases indicated as applicable.

If a product has changed names recently so that you might be more familiar with the current name for that product, that name is provided as additional information. No later version is implied by the inclusion of a newer product name unless specific versions of that product are also listed.

Red Hat Discovery is intended to help you find and understand your Red Hat product inventory, including unknown product usage across complex networks. The reports generated by Discovery are best understood through your partnership with a Red Hat Solution Architect (SA) or Technical Account Manager (TAM) or through the analysis and assistance supplied by the Subscription Education and Awareness Program (SEAP).

Although you can install and use Discovery independently and then generate and view report data, the Discovery documentation does not provide any information to help you interpret report results. In addition, although Red Hat Support can provide some basic assistance related to installation and usage of Discovery, the support team does not provide any assistance to help you understand the reports.

The Discovery tool does not automatically share data directly with Red Hat. Instead, you choose whether to prepare and send report data to Red Hat for ingestion by Red Hat tools and services. You can use the Discovery tool locally to scan your network for the Red Hat products that Discovery currently supports and then use the generated reports for your own internal purposes.

If you receive an error message that includes text similar to not a valid file on the filesystem, that message might indicate an issue with the mount point on the file system that enables access to the SSH keyfiles.

Log data is also copied to stdout and can be accessed through Podman logs. To follow the log output, include the -f option as shown in the following command:

podman logs -f discovery-server
podman logs -f discovery-celery-worker

podman logs -f discovery-server
podman logs -f discovery-celery-worker

Passwords are not stored as plain text. They are encrypted and decrypted by using the content of the secret.txt file as a secret key. If you need to back up and restore the secret.txt file, use these steps.