Chapter 2. Managing system staleness and deletion with Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
As a systems administrator, you can specify when your systems that are managed by Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux are considered stale, as well as the amount of time that your systems are inactive before they are deleted from the inventory.
2.1. Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux system staleness and deletion
A system is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) environment that is managed through the Red Hat Insights Inventory feature of the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. System activity is automatically monitored by Red Hat. If a system is inactive for a specified period of time, it is labeled stale. After a system is stale for a specified period of time, a system staleness warning is issued, and after another specified period of time, the system is deleted from the Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux inventory. After a system is deleted, it must be reregistered to be added back to your inventory.
The default configuration requires systems to communicate with Red Hat daily. If a system does not communicate with Red Hat within one day, it is automatically labeled stale and a warning icon appears at the top of the systems page, in the Last seen: field. If it does not communicate within 7 days, it is labeled stale warning and the Last seen: field turns red. If it does not communicate with Red Hat within 14 days, it is deleted. However, there are situations where a system is offline for an extended period of time, but is still being used. For example, test environments are often kept offline except when they are used for testing. Edge devices, for example submarines or Internet of Things (IoT) devices, can be out of range of communication for extended periods of time. You can modify the system staleness and deletion values to accommodate these situations.
2.2. Modifying Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux system staleness and deletion time limits
You can modify the system staleness and deletion time limits for both conventional and edge (immutable) systems that are managed by Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Do this so that systems that are offline but still active are not deleted. Note that any changes that you make to these limits affect all of your conventional or edge systems.
Prerequisites
- You are logged in to the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console as a user with the Organization Staleness and Deletion Administrator role.
Procedure
- On the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console main page, click RHEL in the Red Hat Insights tile.
- In the left navigation bar, click Inventory > System Configuration > Staleness and Deletion. The Staleness and Deletion page displays the current settings for system staleness, system stale warning, and system deletion for conventional systems.
- Optional: To manage the staleness and configuration settings for edge (immutable) systems, select the Immutable (OSTree) tab.
- To change these values, click Edit. The drop-down arrows next to each value are now enabled.
Click the arrow next to the value that you want to change and then select a new value.
NoteThe system stale warning value must be less than the system deletion value.
- Optional: To revert to the default values for the organization, click Reset.
Click Save to save your changes.
NoteIf you set the system deletion maximum time to less than the current maximum time, systems that have been stale for longer than then new maximum time will be deleted.
2.3. Viewing the state of an Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux system
You can view the state of your systems to check for staleness and potential scheduled deletion.
Prerequisites
- You are logged in to the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console.
Procedure
- On the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console main page, click RHEL in the Red Hat Insights tile.
- In the left navigation bar, click Inventory > Systems. The Systems page lists the systems that are managed by Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
To view the state of a system, click a system name and scroll to the bottom of the page. The state is listed in the System status box. It is either Active or Stale.
- If the state is Stale, a warning icon appears at the top of the system page, in the Last seen: field and field is highlighted in brown.
- If the state is Stale for a specified amount of time, the system is labeled stale warning and the Last seen: field turns red.
- If the system has a stale warning icon in the Last seen: field, click the icon to view when the system will be deleted from the inventory. For example, "System scheduled for removal in 11 days."
