Chapter 4. Systems lifecycle in the inventory application
A system is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) host that is managed by the Red Hat Insights inventory in the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. System activity is automatically monitored by Red Hat. All systems registered with inventory follow a lifecycle that includes the following states: fresh, stale, and stale warning. The state that a system resides in depends on the last time it was reported by a data collector to the inventory application. Systems are automatically deleted from inventory if they do not report within a given time frame. The goal of the deletion mechanism is to maintain an up-to-date, accurate view of your inventory.
Here is a description of each state:
Fresh
The default configuration requires systems to communicate with Red Hat daily. A system with the status of fresh, is active and is regularly reported to the inventory application. It will be reported by one of the data collectors described in section 1.2. Most systems are in this state during typical operations.
Stale
A system with the status of stale, has NOT been reported to the inventory application in the last day, which is equivalent to the last 26 hours.
Stale warning
A system with the status of stale warning, has NOT been reported to the inventory application in the last 14 days. When reaching this state, a system is flagged for automatic deletion. Once a system is removed from inventory it will no longer appear in the inventory application and Insights data analysis results will no longer be available.
4.1. Determining system state in inventory
There are two ways to determine which state a sysem is currently in. Use this procedure to identify system state on the Systems page:
Prerequisites
- You have Inventory Hosts Viewer access.
Procedure
- Navigate to the Red Hat Insights > RHEL > Inventory page.
- Click the Filter drop down list, select Status.
- Click the Filter by status dropdown and select the state(s) you want to include in your query.
- Click Reset filters to clear your query.
Alternatively, you can discover system(s) state(s) on the Dashboard:
Prerequisites
- You have Inventory Hosts Administrator access.
Procedure
- Navigate to the Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux dashboard page.
- Look at the top left of the screen and you will see the total number of Systems registered with Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
- Look to the right of the total number and you will see the number of stale systems and the number of systems to be removed.
- Click the blue stale systems link or the systems to be removed link, if applicable, to navigate to the inventory page and view more granular details.
4.1.1. Modifying system staleness and deletion time limits in inventory
By default, system states have the following time limits:
- Systems are labeled stale if they are not reported in 1 day. A warning icon appears of the top of the Systems page in the Last seen: field.
- Systems are labeled stale warning if they are not reported within 7 days. In this case the Last seen: field turns red.
- Systems that are not reported in 14 days are deleted. git st
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 testing. Edge devices, 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 time limits (for both conventional and immutable systems), to accommodate these unique situations. 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 immutable systems.
Prerequisites
- You are logged into 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.
