Chapter 7. April 2024
7.1. Product-wide updates
7.1.1. Published blogs and resources
- Blog post: Synchronize instance tags from Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure with Red Hat Insights by Jerome Marc (April 17, 2024)
- Blog post: Red Hat Insights cost management now available for ARM, IBM Z and POWER by Pau Garcia Quiles (April 25, 2024)
- Blog post: Boost your cluster operations with Deployment Validation and Insights Advisor for Workloads by Tomas Dosek (April 30, 2024)
7.2. Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
7.2.1. Remote host configuration (rhc) and the Insights client
Upcoming End of Life for Basic Authentication mechanism for Insights client
Effective December 30th, 2024, the Insights client will no longer support Basic Authentication as an option for connecting a host with Red Hat Insights.
Basic Authentication is not the default authentication mechanism, but it has been available as a manually configured option for a select set of workflows. Red Hat recommends that you modify host systems using Basic Authentication to instead use certificate authentication. Otherwise, the systems will not be able to connect to Insights after the end of December 2024.
For more information, see the following KCS article: How to switch from Basic Auth to Certificate Authentication for Red Hat Insights and the Red Hat Insights Life Cycle page.
7.2.2. Inventory
Hosted RHSM accounts in SCA mode are now pointed to Inventory
Accounts using Simple Content Access (SCA) mode and hosted RHSM for inventory management have now been migrated from access.redhat.com to https://console.redhat.com/insights/inventory.
For more information, see the following article: Transitioning Red Hat Subscription Management to the Hybrid Cloud Console.
7.2.3. Remediations
Validation of duplicate or blank remediation names
Insights now validates new playbooks created using the Remediate with Ansible option. The validation process prevents the creation of any playbooks that contain blank values, or that contain values that already exist in playbooks in the same account.
7.2.4. Advisor
CrowdStrike recommendations
Red Hat has partnered with CrowdStrike to co-develop a new set of Insights Advisor recommendations. The first recommendation, The Falcon sensor is in Reduced Functionality Mode (RFM) when it is set to kernel mode and does not support the current kernel was released in late April.
New recommendations released
Nine new recommendations were added in April:
-
Kernel panic occurs when accessing data on a gfs2 filesystem when it is mounted with
quota=onoption -
cronjobs failed due to a known bug inlibselinux - The system is unable to boot in GUI due to incorrect ownership on GNOME files or directories
- AD users fail to log in due to a known issue in SSSD
-
Virtual Machines fail to be created or started when using
spiceorqxlin VM XML after upgrading to RHEL 9 -
System crash occurs when executing
kpartxcommand on dm-multipath device due to a known bug -
The
leappupgrade fails when a third partynode.jspackage is installed on RHEL 7 - D-Bus service fails to run when the machine-id file does not exist or does not have the correct permissions
-
Package installation and update with
yumorrpmfails due to a mismatch of therpmandrpm-plugin-selinux
7.2.5. Tasks
Quick Starts now available to help with getting started
The Red Hat Insights UI now contains a Quick start for each of the available Tasks. Quick starts offer in-app guidance to help you prepare for and run a Task. To launch a Quick start, click the Help me get started link within a Task section.
7.2.6. Image Builder
Insights Images now creates ISO images with osbuild.ks
Previously, users manually added the fleet.ks kickstart to the ISO to enable a non-interactive installation. With this update, the osbuild.ks file is now automatically injected into the ISO images that are created from Insights images during image building. Consequently, users no longer need to customize the image to enable non-interactive installation
7.3. OpenShift Container Platform
7.3.1. Cost Management
Tag reconciliation
Insights cost management reads labels from OpenShift and tags from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud, and makes all of them available as a unified list.
Since an arbitrary number of OpenShift clusters and cloud accounts can be added to one Cost Management account (Red Hat organization), and because tag/label naming conventions can be inconsistent or can change over time, situations can arise where multiple tags represent one concept requiring users to perform complex manual post-processing.
The Cost Management Settings page now allows you to define tag maps to combine multiple imported tags into one, simplifying cost aggregation and reports and removing the need for manual post-processing.
Tag reconciliation also enables Insights to perform cost distribution based on tags, in addition to the existing features that cost models currently support.
Cluster information page
Sometimes cloud and/or OpenShift costs reported by Insights cost management do not match the user view in the cloud provider console. This discrepancy is not due to a bug in cost management but can occur for the following reasons:
- a lack of OpenShift or cloud billing data
- a missing integration between the Hybrid Cloud Console and either the OpenShift cluster(s), or the AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and/or Oracle Cloud customer accounts
Both conditions can cause missing billing and/or cluster data in Insights cost management, which in turn leads to the cost discrepancy.
To make this condition easier for users to diagnose, two new views have been added in the cluster breakdown section of the limit=10&filter[offset]=0&group_by[cluster]=*[OpenShift details page]:
- The Cluster information view offers essential cluster information, such as the cluster UUID, Cost Management Metrics Operator version, and links to integrations. This view also provides additional information about when to update the Cost Management Metrics Operator version.
- The Data details view offers insights into data processing, helping users track data flows through Cost Management. This view provides visibility into which OpenShift and cloud data was processed, and when it was processed.
Excel and Power BI sample reports
Red Hat Insights cost management provides powerful dashboards and reports, with export capabilities both in the web UI (to CSV) and through the API (JSON and CSV).
You can use an external business intelligence (BI) tool to combine data and insights with your business information. This approach can help you to answer questions such as the following:
- Does the nightly batch job that processes POS transactions cost more because more transactions are being processed (because business is growing), or is it because the last release of the application consumes more resources?
- Is my total spending trend following/predicting my business?
- Is my total cluster capacity growing according to the same trend as my business?
- Are my development teams getting better in terms of resource utilization (that is, are recommendation values converting to current values)?
- Is capacity converting to recommendations?
Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Power BI are the most popular BI tools. Both tools read data from the Cost Management API. Sample reports in Microsoft Excel and MIcrosoft Power BI formats are now available for free from the following repository: https://github.com/project-koku/cost-mgmt-powerbi-sample
These sample reports achieve the following goals:
- Show good practices (for example, not requesting all of the desired data at the same time).
- Show familiar data. The Insights web UI is embedded within the Excel and Power BI sample reports, so that you see which API endpoints to use and how to use them in your custom reports.
- Produce self-contained reporting, even at the cost of suboptimal decisions (which are clearly documented in the sample reports). For example, the Excel sample stores the credentials in a CSV file (whereas the recommended procedure uses a vault), and the Power BI sample uses Excel as storage (whereas Power BI normally uses a database, such as Microsoft SQL Server or Azure SQL).
Download the latest release from: https://github.com/project-koku/cost-mgmt-powerbi-sample/releases
