Chapter 1. What is the subscriptions service?
The subscriptions service provides reporting of subscription usage information across the constituent parts of your hybrid infrastructure, including physical and virtual technology deployments; on-premise and cloud environments; and cluster, instance, and workload use cases for select Red Hat product portfolios.
Currently the subscriptions service supports the following product portfolios:
- Unified reporting of Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription usage information for physical, virtual, hypervisor, and public cloud based usage. This unified reporting model enhances your ability to consume, track, report, and reconcile your RHEL subscriptions with your purchasing agreements and deployment types.
- Reporting of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform subscription usage information. The subscriptions service uses data available from Red Hat internal subscription services, in addition to data from Red Hat OpenShift reporting tools, to show aggregated cluster usage data in the context of different Red Hat OpenShift subscription types.
- Reporting of Red Hat Cloud Services subscription usage information. The subscriptions service also uses data available from some of the Red Hat OpenShift reporting tools to show usage of these services. These services consume resources differently, so the tracking of usage can vary per product. In general, usage can be represented as a combination of one or more metrics such as data transfer and data storage for workload activities, and instance availability for the consumption of control plane resources. Usage can also be represented as cluster usage data for the virtual cores.
The simplified, consistent subscription reporting experience shows your account-wide Red Hat subscriptions compared to your total inventory across all deployments and programs. It is an at-a-glance impression of both your account’s remaining subscription capacity measured against a subscription threshold and the historical record of your software usage.
The subscriptions service provides increased and ongoing visibility of your subscription usage. By implementing it, you might be eligible to shift away from the challenges of the current content enforcement model for subscriptions. This older model can be error-prone and inconvenient for your operational workload requirements, while the newer model of content access and consumption results in fewer barriers to content deployment. The simple content access tool enables this shift to the newer model.
You can choose to use neither, either, or both of these services. However, the subscriptions service and simple content access are designed as complementary services and function best when they are used in tandem. Simple content access simplifies the subscription experience by allowing more flexible ways of consuming content. The subscriptions service provides account-wide visibility of usage across your subscription profile, adding governance capabilities to this flexible content consumption.
To learn more about the simple content access tool and how you can use it with the subscriptions service, see the Getting Started with Simple Content Access guide.
As of April 2021, simple content access is now available to customers who manage subscriptions through Red Hat Satellite or Red Hat Subscription Management. Previously, simple content access was available only to Satellite customers. In addition, the previous restrictions that limited the use of simple content access to certain geographical regions during the early development of simple content access have now been lifted. Customers in all geographical regions can now use simple content access.
