Installing and Configuring Red Hat Discovery

Red Hat Discovery is an inspection and reporting tool. It is designed to find, identify, and report environment data, or facts, such as the number of physical and virtual systems on a network, their operating systems, and other configuration data. In addition, it is designed to find, identify, and report more detailed facts for some versions of key Red Hat packages and products for the IT resources in that network.

The ability to inspect the software and systems that are running on your network improves your ability to understand and report on your subscription usage. Ultimately, this inspection and reporting process is part of the larger system administration task of managing your inventories.

Red Hat Discovery requires the configuration of two basic structures to access IT resources and run the inspection process. A credential contains user access data, such as the username and password or SSH key of a user with sufficient authority to run the inspection process on a particular source or some of the assets on that source. A source contains data about a single asset or multiple assets that are to be inspected. These assets can be physical machines, virtual machines, or containers, identified as hostnames, IP addresses, IP ranges, or subnets. These assets can also be a systems management solution such as vCenter Server or Red Hat Satellite Server, or can be clusters deployed on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

You can save multiple credentials and sources to use with Discovery in various combinations as you run inspection processes, or scans. When you have completed a scan, you can access these facts in the output as a collection of formatted data, or report, to review the results.

By default, the credentials and sources that are created during the use of Red Hat Discovery are encrypted in a database. The values are encrypted with AES-256 encryption. They are decrypted when the Red Hat Discovery server runs a scan with the use of a vault password to access the encrypted values that are stored in the database.

Red Hat Discovery is an agentless inspection tool, so there is no need to install the tool on every source that is to be inspected. However, the system that Discovery is installed on must have access to the systems to be discovered and inspected.

Red Hat Discovery finds the following Red Hat products. For each version or release, the earliest version is listed, with later releases indicated as applicable.

If a product has changed names recently so that you might be more familiar with the current name for that product, that name is provided as additional information. No later version is implied by the inclusion of a newer product name unless specific versions of that product are also listed.

Red Hat Discovery is intended to help you find and understand your Red Hat product inventory, including unknown product usage across complex networks. The reports generated by Discovery are best understood through your partnership with a Red Hat Solution Architect (SA) or Technical Account Manager (TAM) or through the analysis and assistance supplied by the Subscription Education and Awareness Program (SEAP).

Although you can install and use Discovery independently and then generate and view report data, the Discovery documentation does not provide any information to help you interpret report results. In addition, although Red Hat Support can provide some basic assistance related to installation and usage of Discovery, the support team does not provide any assistance to help you understand the reports.

The Discovery tool does not automatically share data directly with Red Hat. Instead, you choose whether to prepare and send report data to Red Hat for ingestion by Red Hat tools and services. You can use the Discovery tool locally to scan your network for the Red Hat products that Discovery currently supports and then use the generated reports for your own internal purposes.

The system on which you are going to install Red Hat Discovery must meet or exceed the following hardware requirements:

The system on which you are going to install Red Hat Discovery must meet the following software requirements:

The Discovery documentation assumes that the most recent version of the Red Hat Discovery installer and tool is installed on your system. No warranty or support is offered by Red Hat if the version of Discovery used is obsolete. The latest version of Red Hat Discovery can be verified by using the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog.

In addition to these software requirements, Discovery has dependencies on other software that is required to install and run Discovery, primarily the Podman container tool. The Podman package is included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and later, so you are not required to obtain the Podman package separately. You will need sudo privileges to install Podman. You will need Podman version 4.9.4 or later to successfully install Discovery.

The environment in which you are going to install and use Red Hat Discovery must meet the following requirements. Some of these requirements affect the systems on which you are going to install and run Red Hat Discovery. Others affect the systems in your IT infrastructure that you are going to scan with Discovery.

In your network:

On the system where Red Hat Discovery is installed and running:

On the systems in your network where Discovery runs scans:

During the connected installation of the Discovery database and server container images, you obtain the Discovery containers from the container images on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog website, configure the containers and configure Discovery, and start the containers.

You can change the Discovery server password, and it is possible that security standards at your organization might require that you change it. At a minimum, you should change the password value to align with common security best practices.

The Discovery administrator password must meet the following requirements:

To reset the administrator password, run the following command and follow the prompts to enter the new password:

discovery-installer create-server-password

discovery-installer create-server-password

Follow the prompts to change and verify the password. If Discovery is running when you change the password, you must restart Discovery for the new password to take effect.

To restart Discovery, run the following command:

systemctl --user restart discovery-app

systemctl --user restart discovery-app

The following steps are optional, but can improve the efficiency and usability of your Discovery application.

During the disconnected installation of the Discovery server, you begin with a connected system to install the Podman container management tool and obtain the Discovery container images on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog website. You then transfer those container images to the disconnected system where you want to run Discovery, install Podman on the disconnected system, configure Discovery, and start the Discovery application.

On the connected system

On the disconnected system

You can change the Discovery server password, and it is possible that security standards at your organization might require that you change it. At a minimum, you should change the password value to align with common security best practices.

The server administrator password must be:

To reset the administrator password, run the following command and follow the prompts to enter the new password:

discovery-installer create-server-password

discovery-installer create-server-password

Follow the prompts to change and verify the password. If Discovery is running when the password is changed, Discovery must be restarted for the changes to take effect.

To restart Discovery, run the following command:

systemctl --user restart discovery-app

systemctl --user restart discovery-app

The following steps are optional, but can improve the efficiency and usability of your Discovery application.