Chapter 25. Why is a RHEL server appearing in an unexpected place in the subscriptions service usage?

For some Red Hat products, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is included with and is installed to support that product. This inclusion is sometimes also referred to as being "bundled with" another product. For example, RHEL is included with Red Hat Satellite and is tracked separately in a Satellite page view on the RHEL page in the subscriptions service, but does not appear with the main RHEL usage. In addition, RHEL is included with all Red Hat OpenShift subscriptions, but that RHEL does not appear in the usage results on the RHEL page. Bundled RHEL is not tracked or counted against the total RHEL usage or capacity that is intended for production workloads or similar purposes.

In some cases, these bundled RHEL packages might be inadvertently installed in isolation, without the full set of packages included in the bundled subscription. However, these bundled RHEL packages are still associated with the complete set of certificates contained in the bundled subscription. Because the subscriptions service is aware of the associated certificates and uses them to help identify the subscription, RHEL packages that are installed in isolation from their complete bundle could report usage in unexpected places and result in inaccurate usage, capacity, and subscription threshold reporting.

For example, installing a RHEL package from a bundled Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform subscription without the rest of the packages from that bundled subscription could result in a RHEL server appearing as a cluster in the usage results for the Red Hat OpenShift page in the subscriptions service, even if there are no Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform nodes or clusters on that server.

For best results, Red Hat subscriptions and their associated packages should be installed for the purposes for which they were intended. Installing isolated packages from bundled subscriptions is not a best practice, and will lead to poor quality usage results in the subscriptions service.