Getting Started with the Subscriptions Service

The subscriptions service tracks RHEL Annual subscription usage on physical systems, virtual systems, hypervisors, and public cloud. For a limited subset of subscriptions, currently Red Hat Enterprise Linux Extended Life Cycle Support Add-On on Amazon Web Services (AWS), it tracks RHEL pay-as-you-go On-Demand subscription usage for instances running in public cloud providers.

If your RHEL installations predate certificate-based subscription management, the subscriptions service will not track that inventory.

Generally, the subscriptions service tracks Red Hat OpenShift usage as cluster size on physical and virtual systems. The cluster size is the sum of all subscribed nodes. A subscribed node is a compute or worker node that runs workloads, as opposed to a control plane or infrastructure node that manages the cluster.

However, beyond this general rule, tracking is dependent on several factors:

Because the services in the Red Hat Cloud Services portfolio consume different types of resources while handling different types of workloads, the subscriptions service tracks usage of these services in different ways.

You must meet at least one of the following requirements for Red Hat Enterprise Linux management:

You must meet the following requirements for Red Hat OpenShift management, based on your product version and subscription type:

The Red Hat Cloud Services portfolio includes managed services that rely on Red Hat infrastructure. Part of that infrastructure is the Red Hat OpenShift monitoring stack tools that, among other jobs, supply data about subscription usage to the subscriptions service.

For the following services, no user setup of the monitoring stack tools is necessary:

Insights as a data collection tool is ideal for the always-connected customer. If you fit this profile, you are interested in using Insights not only as a data collection tool, but also as a solution that provides analytic, threat identification, remediation, and reporting capabilities.

With the inclusion of Insights with every Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription beginning with version 8, and with the availability of Red Hat Insights for Red Hat OpenShift in April 2021, the use of Insights as your data collection tool becomes even more convenient.

However, using Insights as the data collection tool is not ideal if the Insights agent cannot connect directly to the cloud.redhat.com website or if Red Hat Satellite cannot be used as a proxy for that connection. In addition, it cannot be used as the sole solution if hypervisor host-guest mapping is required for virtual data centers (VDCs) or similar virtualized environments. In that case, Insights must be used in conjunction with Satellite.

Red Hat Subscription Management is an ideal data collection tool for the connected customer who uses the Subscription Manager agent to send data to Red Hat Subscription Management on the Red Hat Customer Portal.

For customers that are using the subscriptions service, Red Hat Subscription Management automatically synchronizes its data with the Cloud Services platform tools. Therefore, in situations where Red Hat Subscription Management is in use, or required, such as with RHEL 7 or later, it is being used as a data collection tool.

The use of Satellite as the data collection tool is useful for customers who have specific needs in their environment that either inhibit or prohibit the use of the Insights agent or the Subscription Manager agent for data collection.

For example, you might be able to connect to the Cloud Services platform directly, but you might find the connection and maintenance of a per-organization Satellite installation is more convenient than the per-system installation of Insights. The use of Satellite also enables you to inspect the information that is being sent to the Cloud Services platform on an organization-wide basis instead of a system-only basis.

As another example, your Satellite installation might not be able to connect directly to the Cloud Services platform because you are running Satellite from a disconnected network. In that case, you must export the Satellite reports to a connected system and then upload that data to the Cloud Services platform. To do this, you must use a minimum of Satellite 6.9 or later (versions that are under full support). You must also install the Satellite inventory upload plugin on your Satellite server.

Finally, you might have a need to view the subscriptions service results for RHEL usage from a virtual data center (VDC) subscription or similar virtualized environments. To do so, you must obtain accurate hypervisor host-guest mapping information as part of the data that is collected for analysis. This type of data collection requires the use of Satellite in combination with the Satellite inventory upload plugin and the virt-who tool.

The data collection for Red Hat OpenShift usage is dependent on several tools, including tools developed by the Red Hat OpenShift development team. One tool is Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager. Another set of tools is known as the monitoring stack. This set of tools is based on the open source Prometheus project and its ecosystem, and includes Prometheus, Telemetry, Thanos, Observatorium, and others.

The subscriptions service is designed to work with customers who use Red Hat OpenShift 4.1 and later products in connected environments. For the Red Hat OpenShift version 4.1 and later products that the subscriptions service can track, Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager and the monitoring stack tools are used to gather and process cluster data before sending it to Red Hat Subscription Management. Red Hat Subscription Management provides the relevant usage data to the Cloud Services platform tools such as inventory and the subscriptions service.

Customers with disconnected environments can use the Red Hat OpenShift data collection tools by manually creating each cluster in Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager. This workaround enables customers with disconnected environments to simulate an account-level view of their Red Hat OpenShift usage. For example, an organization with disconnected clusters distributed across several departments might find this workaround useful.

For Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform version 3.11, data collection is dependent on an older, RHEL based reporting model. Therefore, data collection is dependent upon the connection of the RHEL nodes to one of the RHEL data collection tools, such as Insights, Red Hat Subscription Management, or Satellite.

The Red Hat Cloud Services portfolio includes managed services that rely on Red Hat infrastructure. Part of that infrastructure is the monitoring stack tools that, among other jobs, supply data about subscription usage to the subscriptions service. No additional user action is necessary to set up these data collection tools for the following managed services:

The data collection for some pay-as-you-go On-Demand subscriptions requires a connection known as a cloud integration, configured with the integrations service of the Hybrid Cloud Console.

A cloud integration on the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console is a connection to a service, application, or provider that supplies data to another Hybrid Cloud Console service. Through a cloud integration, the connected service can connect with and use data from public cloud providers and other services or tools to collect data for that service.

The following products require the configuration of a cloud integration to enable data collection for the subscriptions service:

You can set subscription attributes for the RHEL product from RHEL, Red Hat Subscription Management, or Satellite.

You should set the subscription attributes from only one tool. If you use multiple tools, there is a possibility for mismatched settings. Because these tools report data to the Cloud Services platform tools at different intervals, or heartbeats, and because the subscriptions service shows its results as a once-per-day snapshot based on last-reported data, adding subscription attributes to more than one tool could potentially affect the quality of the subscriptions service data.

Setting the subscription attributes from RHEL

For RHEL 8 and later, you can use a few different methods to set subscription attributes. These methods, which include using the syspurpose command line tool, are described in a few different contexts in the RHEL 8 documentation. For more information, see the following links:

Setting the subscription attributes from Red Hat Subscription Management

For Red Hat Subscription Management, the methods to set subscription attributes are contained in the section for registering a system and the descriptions of register commands, but are more fully described in the section related to using system purpose. For more information, see the following link:

Setting the subscription attributes from Satellite

For Satellite, the methods to set subscription attributes are described in instructions for creating a host and editing the system purpose of a host. For more information, see the following link:

You can set subscription attributes from Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager for version 4. For version 3, you use the same reporting tools as those defined for RHEL.

Setting the subscription attributes for Red Hat OpenShift 4

You can set subscription attributes at the cluster level from Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager, where the attributes are described as subscription settings.

Setting the subscription attributes for Red Hat OpenShift 3

You can set subscription attributes at the node level by using the same methods that you use for RHEL, setting these values from RHEL itself, Red Hat Subscription Management, or Satellite. As described in that section, set subscription attributes by using only one method so that the settings are not duplicated.

If your subscription contains a mix of socket-based and core-based nodes, you can also set subscription attributes that identify this fact for each node. As you view your Red Hat OpenShift usage, you can use a filter to switch between cores and sockets as the unit of measurement.

To set this subscription attribute data, run the applicable command for each node:

The current offerings for Red Hat Cloud Services services, for example, Red Hat OpenShift AI or Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, are of one subscription type only. Therefore, setting subscription attributes for these services is not required.

Install Red Hat Insights to collect information about your inventory.

When the Red Hat Insights client is installed on a system, it collects data about that system on a daily basis and sends it to the Red Hat Insights cloud application. The data might also be shared with other applications on the Cloud Services platform, such as inventory or subscription watch. Insights provides configuration and command options, including options for data obfuscation and data redaction, to manage that data.

For more information, see the Client Configuration Guide for Red Hat Insights, available with the Red Hat Insights product documentation.

You might also want to examine the types of data that Insights collects and sends to Red Hat or add controls to the data that is sent. For additional information that supplements the information available in the product documentation, see the following articles:

The subscriptions service views can be grouped generally into the graph view and the table view.

The graph view is a visual representation of the subscription usage and capacity for your organization, where your organization is also a Red Hat account. This view helps you track usage trends and determine utilization, which is the percentage of deployed software when measured against your total subscriptions.

The table view can contain one or more tables that provide more details about the general data in the graph view. The current instances table, also referred to as the current systems table, provides details about subscription usage on individual components of your environment, for example, systems in your inventory or clusters in your cloud infrastructure or restricted network. The current subscriptions table provides details about individual subscriptions in your account. The table view helps you to find where Red Hat software is deployed in your environment, to understand how individual subscriptions contribute to your overall capacity for usage of similar types of subscriptions, to resolve questions you might have about subscription usage, and to refine plans for future deployments.

The usage and utilization graph view

The graph view shows you your total subscription usage and capacity over time in a graph form. It provides perspective on your account’s subscription threshold, current subscription utilization, and remaining subscription capacity, along with the historical trend of your software usage. The graph view might contain a single graph or multiple graphs, depending upon how subscription usage for a product is measured.

The usage and capacity calculations that appear in the graph are based on data snapshots that are provided periodically as the Hybrid Cloud Console processing tools analyze information from the various data collection tools and data sources. The data snapshots for Annual subscriptions generally update once every 24 hours. The data snapshots for On-Demand subscriptions can be more frequent, updating multiple times per day.

Although the graph shows trends over a selected time interval, you can also view more specific information for the graph. For example, if the selected time interval is Weekly, you can hover over the graph near a date to see more specific data for a particular week.

You can also use the available filters, which can vary by product, to change the usage data that displays in the graph. For example, you can filter by the time interval, the unit of measurement, or by the subscription attribute filters such as service level agreement (SLA), as applicable. Additional filter options might include a filter by the type of usage measurement, such as physical or virtual, or a filter by variants for that product, such as a supporting architecture of x86.

The graph view: example graph

The following image shows an example RHEL usage and utilization graph in the subscriptions service. For other product pages, the graph view will contain differences in design, depending on how those products are sold and measured.

For the graph, the time filter is set to a daily view, and the graph displays a month of RHEL usage.

Figure 17.1. Usage and utilization graph example

The table view: current instances table

The current instances table shows you details about usage on individual components in your environment, taken from the most recent daily snapshot of the usage data. This table provides information that can help you correlate the aggregated usage totals in the graph with the current software deployments on individual components across your organization. The components and data shown in the table vary by product because of the different ways that usage is tracked for products, by socket count, core count, core hours, and so on. Also, a component that displays as an "instance" or a "system" in the table can be a physical or virtual machine, or it can be another object such as a cluster or instance. Therefore, generic references to this table as either the current instances table or the current systems table are for convenience only.

The information in the current instances table generally shows the name of the instance or system, the type of the system, the usage total for that system according to the unit of measurement, and the date that the system was last seen. However, the available columns in the table might differ according to the types of data that are relevant for that product. Columns in the table are sortable.

For the Name column that contains the name of the system, the system is the machine, either physical or virtualized, on which the product or product set is deployed. A system can also be a different component, such as a Red Hat OpenShift cluster or an instance of a Red Hat Cloud Services service. The system is usually represented by either its display name or its universally unique ID (UUID). For multi-guest systems such as hypervisors, you can expand the system to see more information about individual guests. For some objects in the Name column, you can also click the system name to open the full system record in a different resource, for example, in the Hybrid Cloud Console inventory application.

For the Guests column that displays in the table when hypervisor usage can be tracked, the guest count is for the number of guests that are under the management of that hypervisor system. For other types of usage, the double dashed line represents a null value for that system.

For the Type column that contains the type of the system, the type is the infrastructure type on which the product or product set is deployed. A system can be a physical host, hypervisor, individual virtual machine, or other form of virtual deployment such as a public cloud instance. The information in this column might not be applicable to all products, so for some products the Type column might not appear.

For the column where the usage total for that system is displayed, the column label will vary according to how product usage is measured. For subscriptions where usage is measured with multiple metrics, multiple columns will display. The usage is the actual or equivalent amount of physical hardware that the product or product set is consuming on that system. Usage is counted according to the applicable unit of measurement, which in turn is determined by the terms of the subscription. For example, for a subscription that is sold by sockets, the usage total is the number of sockets, also known as subscribed sockets, that are consumed by a system. Other subscriptions such as On-Demand subscriptions are sold with different terms, such as by core hours, or might include multiple metrics in the terms, such as data transfer, data storage, and instance hours.

For the Last seen column that contains a date, that last seen date is the date that the system was last found by the Cloud Services platform tools, such as the inventory service or Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager and other tools in the monitoring stack. As part of the underlying tasks that subscriptions and other tools perform to calculate usage, the inventory service and the monitoring stack help to identify and deduplicate system data that is gathered by the various data collection tools.

As with the usage and utilization graph, you can use the filters to change the data that displays in the current instances table. However, a change to the time interval, such as changing from days to weeks, has no effect on the current instances table. The data displayed is from the most recent snapshot, so it is usually no more than 24 hours old.

You can also search the current instances table for a specific system name or a group of similarly named systems by using the search field. Exact and partial strings are accepted, but common wildcard characters are treated as literal characters, not special character wildcards.

The table view: current subscriptions table

The current subscriptions table shows you details about your currently active subscriptions, taken from the most recent daily snapshot of this data. This table contains information that can help you understand the maximum capacity for your usage of that product within your account. The maximum capacity is displayed as the subscription threshold in the usage and utilization graph view.

The table shows the capacity for each subscription in the unit of measurement by which that subscription is sold, for example, sockets or cores. The sum of the capacity for all rows equals the subscription threshold.

By using the data in the current subscriptions table, you can more fully understand how individual subscriptions are contributing to the subscription threshold. This information can help you plan for any future purchasing decisions, such as adjusting the amount of existing subscriptions or purchasing different subscriptions that are more suited to your usage profile. You can also use the information in the table to anticipate upcoming events that could affect your business activities in relation to purchasing and renewals, such as contract expiration.

The information in the current subscriptions table generally shows the name of the product subscription, the service level agreement (SLA) for the subscription, the quantity of the subscription, the capacity of that subscription according to the unit of measurement, and the next renewal event for the subscription. All columns in the table are sortable.

The Product column lists unique product subscriptions that are currently active in your account. Future-dated subscriptions that are not yet active do not appear in the table. Expired subscriptions that are not renewed are removed from the table.

In general, subscriptions that share the same stock-keeping unit (SKU) appear on a single row. Subscriptions that can be grouped on the same row include these characteristics:

However, some subscriptions might display multiple times in the Product column. These subscriptions include these characteristics:

The Service level column contains the service level agreement (SLA) for a subscription, as defined within the terms of the subscription. Examples include Premium, Standard, or Self-Support. This information can sometimes help you distinguish between two subscriptions in the Product column that have identical descriptions.

The Quantity column contains the number of active subscriptions for a SKU. For example, a single table row might contain multiples of the same SKU purchased in the same transaction. It might also contain multiples of the same SKU purchased in different transactions.

For the column where the capacity for a subscription is displayed, the column label will vary according to how product usage is measured. For example, RHEL is sold in socket pairs, so the capacity column for RHEL has the label Sockets. This capacity column measures the maximum amount of available usage for the subscriptions in each table row. Usage is counted according to the applicable unit of measurement, which in turn is determined by the terms of the subscription. When summed, the total for all rows in the table represents the maximum possible capacity of usage for all subscriptions of that product. This value is also the subscription threshold in the graph view.

For some product pages, the capacity column might be replaced with a different column if capacity is not applicable. For example, for an On-Demand subscription, a Subscription type column might display the type of subscription, such as Annual or On-Demand.

The Next renewal column lists the next pending renewal event for any subscription that is included in that row.

Currently, the subscriptions service tracks certain types of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat OpenShift, and Red Hat Cloud Services products. The data that is displayed for usage and capacity varies by product.

Overall usage and capacity trends display on the usage and utilization graph. The information in the current instances table provides additional detail about the most recent day of data from the graph. Where applicable, the information in the current subscriptions table provides additional detail about your currently active subscriptions.

The unit of measurement by which product usage is tracked is determined by the terms of the subscription.

You can further refine the subscriptions service data by selecting values from the available filters in the interface. When you select a filter option, the graph view (and in some cases, the tables in the table view) generally refreshes to show data that relates to that option. In other words, most of the filters are inclusive, not exclusive, for the selected option.

Filtering by time

For Annual subscriptions, you can filter data by several different time intervals, including daily (the default) and quarterly. For On-Demand subscriptions, you can filter by time interval only for the current month or by any other month in the previous 12 months. Because billing cycles for On-Demand subscriptions might vary across the different cloud provider marketplaces that you might purchase from, the calendar month interval is used in the subscriptions service to report On-Demand usage.

Filtering by time affects only the usage and utilization graph view. The current instances table and current subscriptions table views always show the most recent data that is available, whether from the most recent subscriptions service daily snapshot or from more frequent reporting offered by the monitoring stack tools, and is not affected by the time filter.

Filtering by subscription attributes

You can use several filters to filter by subscription attributes, which is data that describes the characteristics and intended usage of subscription. The accuracy of those filters is dependent upon how accurately the subscription attribute data is set.

Subscription attributes might be configured from the operating system or its management tools, or from settings within the product itself. In these various tools, subscription attribute data is also known as system purpose, subscription settings, or similar names. In some cases, subscription attribute values might be derived from the subscription, such as when a subscription is sold either by sockets or cores.

You can use the subscriptions service filters to get a more focused view on usage that meets certain use cases within your subscription profile. For example, filtering your RHEL subscriptions by the SLA filter, which is the service level agreement, to show only those with an SLA of Premium could help you determine the current usage of premium subscriptions compared to your overall capacity for those premium subscriptions. In turn, this knowledge can inform decisions such as additional deployments, actions to mitigate subscription compliance issues, or future purchasing and renewals.

As another example, selecting a nonspecific value for a filter, such as the No SLA or Unspecified options, can help show subscriptions that have subscription attribute values that might be missing or that might be less common and not specifically filterable by the subscriptions service. For those subscriptions with missing subscription attributes, adding that data can improve the accuracy and usefulness of the subscriptions service reporting.

The subscriptions service provides the following filters and filter options for RHEL:

The subscriptions service provides the following filter and filter options for Red Hat OpenShift:

If an offering is available as one subscription type only, such as with Red Hat OpenShift AI, filtering by subscription attributes is not available.

Filtering by type

You can use the Type filter to filter by the type of subscription usage when multiple types of subscription usage are tracked for a product. For example, the subscriptions service tracks RHEL physical, virtual, public cloud, and hypervisor usage to match the different infrastructure types for RHEL product deployment. This filter is different from the Usage filter that corresponds to subscription attribute (system purpose) usage.

Filtering by variant

You can use the Variant filter to filter on various aspects of a subscription that are appropriate for the product page that is displayed. For example, you can filter on architecture variants for RHEL or product variants for Satellite.

Filtering by name (current instances table)

You can filter the data in the current instances table by the contents of Name column, which shows either the display name or universally unique ID (UUID) of each system. To filter by name, use the search field near the Name column.

You can search for a specific system name or a group of similarly named systems. Exact and partial strings are accepted, but common wildcard characters are treated as literal characters, not special character wildcards.

The following information for Red Hat OpenShift On-Demand subscriptions includes an explanation of the applicable units of measurement, a detailed scenario that shows the steps that the subscriptions service and the other Hybrid Cloud Console and monitoring stack tools use to calculate core hour usage, and additional information that can help you understand how core hour usage is reported in the subscriptions service. You can use this information to help you understand the basic principles of how the subscriptions service calculates usage for the time-based units of measurement that also use sampling.

sum_over_time((max by (_id) (cluster:usage:workload:capacity_physical_cpu_cores:min:5m))[1h:1s])

group(cluster:usage:workload:capacity_physical_cpu_cores:max:5m[1h:5m]) by (_id)

23.1.2. Example core hour usage calculation

The following example describes the process for calculating core hour usage for a Red Hat OpenShift On-Demand subscription. You can use this example to help you understand other derived units of measurement where time is one of the base units of the usage calculation and sampling is used as part of the measurement. For example, the vCPU hour calculation for Red Hat OpenShift AI On-Demand is done in the same way, except that the measurement is for virtual cores.

To obtain usage in core hours, the subscriptions service uses numerical integration. Numerical integration is also commonly known as an "area under the curve" calculation, where the area of a complex shape is calculated by using the area of a series of rectangles.

The tools in the Red Hat OpenShift monitoring stack contain the Prometheus query language (PromQL) function sum_over_time, a function that aggregates data for a time interval. This function is the foundation of the core hours calculation in the subscriptions service.

sum_over_time((max by (_id) (cluster:usage:workload:capacity_physical_cpu_cores:min:5m))[1h:1s])

Note

You can run this PromQL query locally in a cluster to show results that include the cluster size and a snapshot of usage.

Every 2 minutes, a cluster reports its size in cores to the monitoring stack tools, including Telemetry. One of the Hybrid Cloud Console tools, the Tally engine, reviews this information every hour in 5 minute intervals. Because the cluster reports to the monitoring stack tools every 2 minutes, each 5 minute interval might contain up to three values for cluster size. The Tally engine selects the smallest cluster size value to represent the full 5 minute interval.

The following example shows how a sample cluster size is collected every 2 minutes and how the smallest size is selected for the 5 minute interval.

Figure 23.1. Calculating the cluster size

Then, for each cluster, the Tally engine uses the selected value and creates a box of usage for each 5 minute interval. The area of the 5-minute box is 300 seconds times the height in cores. For every 5 minute box, this core seconds value is stored and eventually used to calculate the daily, account-wide aggregation of core hour usage.

The following example shows a graphical representation of how an area under the curve is calculated, with cluster size and time used to create usage boxes, and the area of each box used as building blocks to create daily core hour usage totals.

Figure 23.2. Calculating the core hours

Every day, each 5 minute usage value is added to create the total usage of a cluster on that day. Then the totals for each cluster are combined to create daily usage information for all clusters in the account. In addition, the core seconds are converted to core hours.

During the regular 24-hour update of the subscriptions service with the previous day’s data, the core hour usage information for pay-as-you-go subscriptions is updated. In the subscriptions service, the daily core hour usage for the account is plotted on the usage and utilization graph, and additional core hours used information shows the accumulated total for the account. The current instances table also lists each cluster in the account and shows the cumulative number of core hours used in that cluster.

Note

The core hour usage data for the account and for individual clusters that is shown in the subscriptions service interface is rounded to two decimal places for display purposes. However, the data that is used for the subscriptions service calculations and that is provided to the Red Hat Marketplace billing service is at the millicore level, rounded to 6 decimal places.

Every month, the monthly core hour usage total for your account is supplied to Red Hat Marketplace for invoice preparation and billing. For subscription types that are offered with a four-to-one relationship of core hour to vCPU hour, the core hour total from the subscriptions service is divided by 4 for the Red Hat Marketplace billing activities. For subscription types that are offered with a one-to-one relationship of core hour to vCPU hour, no conversion in the total is made.

After the monthly total is sent to Red Hat Marketplace and the new month begins, the usage values for the subscriptions service display reset to 0 for the new current month. You can use filtering to view usage data for previous months for the span of one year.

October 2021: This change assumes that simultaneous multithreading on x86-64 architectures is enabled, resulting in more accurate usage data within the subscriptions service.

Across different technology vendors, the term vCPU can have different definitions. If you work with a number of different vendors, the definition that you use might not match the definition that is used by Red Hat. As a result, you might not be familiar with how Red Hat and the subscriptions service measures usage when vCPUs and simultaneous multithreading (also referred to as hyper-threading) are in use within your environment.

Some vendors offer hypervisors that do not expose to guests whether the CPUs of the guests use simultaneous multithreading. For example, recent versions of the VMware hypervisor do not show the simultaneous multithreading status to the kernel of the VM, and always report threads per core as 1. The effect of this counting method is that customers can interpret the subscriptions service reporting of Red Hat OpenShift usage data related to vCPUs to be artificially doubled.

To address customer concerns about vCPU counting, Red Hat has adjusted its assumptions related to simultaneous multithreading. Red Hat now assumes simultaneous multithreading of 2 threads per core for x86 architectures. For many hypervisors, that assumption results in an accurate counting of vCPUs per core, and customers who use those hypervisors will see no change in their Red Hat OpenShift usage data in the subscriptions service.

However, other customers who use hypervisors that do not expose simultaneous multithreading status to the kernel will see an abrupt change in subscriptions service data in October 2021. Those customers will see their related Red Hat OpenShift usage data in the subscriptions service reduced by 50% on the date that this change in counting is implemented. Past data will not be affected.

Customers who encounter this situation will not be penalized. Red Hat requires that the customer purchase enough subscriptions to cover the usage as counted in the subscriptions service only.

In the past, the discrepancies in the definitions for vCPUs have resulted in known problems with the interpretation of usage and capacity data for some subscriptions service users. This change in the assumptions for simultaneous multithreading is intended to improve the accuracy of vCPU usage data across a wider spectrum of customers, regardless of the hypervisor technology that is deployed.

If you have questions or concerns related to the usage and capacity data that is displayed in the subscriptions service, work with your Red Hat account team to help you understand your data and account status. For additional information about the resolution of this problem, you can also log in to your Red Hat account to view the following issue: Bugzilla issue 1934915.

January 2022: These changes improved capacity analysis for subscriptions that include extra entitlements or infrastructure subscriptions. These improvements resulted in a more accurate calculation of usage and capacity data for those subscriptions and a more accurate calculation of the subscription threshold within the subscriptions service for the Red Hat OpenShift portion of your Red Hat account.

December 2023 and March 2024: These changes involved analyzing the metrics used by Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager for internal operational purposes and determining whether these metrics were still the optimal metrics to use for subscription usage tracking purposes in the subscriptions service. The use of these metrics for two different purposes was determined to be ineffective, and increased the chances for inaccurate subscription usage reporting. Therefore, the subscriptions service changed to a service-level metric that is designed exclusively to track the subscription obligation in cores. The overall assumption for simultaneous multithreading in virtualized, x86 environments at a factor of 2 threads per core remains in effect. For additional information about these changes, see the details in the OCP Cluster Size Corrections Customer Portal article.