Keep subscriptions for managed hosts in compliance

To ensure that your automation controller installation remains compliant with your Red Hat subscription, automation controller provides a way to monitor your subscription status and usage.

Your subscription has two possible statuses:

  • Compliant: Indicates that your subscription is appropriate for the number of hosts that you have automated within your subscription count.
  • Out of compliance: Indicates that you have exceeded the number of hosts in your subscription.

Compliance is computed as follows:

managed > manifest_limit    =>  non-compliant
managed =< manifest_limit   =>  compliant

Where: managed is the number of unique managed hosts without deletions, and manifest_limit is the number of managed hosts in the subscription manifest.

Other important information displayed are:

  • Hosts automated: The number of hosts automated by the job, which consumes the license count.
  • Hosts imported: The number of hosts considering unique host names across all inventory sources. This number does not impact hosts remaining.
  • Hosts remaining: The number of hosts minus the number of hosts automated.
  • Hosts deleted: The number of hosts that were deleted, freeing the license capacity.
  • Active hosts previously deleted: The number of hosts now active that were previously deleted.

For example, if you have a subscription capacity of 10 hosts:

  • Starting with 9 hosts, 2 hosts were added and 3 hosts were deleted, you now have 8 hosts (compliant).
  • 3 hosts were automated again, now you have 11 hosts, which puts you over the subscription limit of 10 (noncompliant).
  • If you delete hosts, refresh the subscription details to see the change in count and status.

View hosts automated in the user interface
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Learn how to view and manage the hosts that have been automated in automation controller.

Procedure
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  1. In the navigation panel, select Automation Analytics > Host Metrics to view the activity associated with hosts, such as those that have been automated and deleted.

    Each unique hostname is listed and sorted by the user’s preference. Host metrics

    Note

    A scheduled task automatically updates these values on a weekly basis and deletes jobs with hosts that were last automated more than a year ago.
  2. Delete unnecessary hosts directly from the Host Metrics view by selecting the required hosts and clicking Delete.

    These are soft-deleted, meaning their records are not removed, but are not being used and thereby not counted towards your subscription.

View hosts automated in the CLI
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Automation controller provides a way to generate a CSV output of the host metric data and host metric summary through the Command Line Interface (CLI). You can also soft delete hosts in bulk through the API.

awx-manage utility
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To collect and manage host metric data and related cluster information in Ansible Automation Platform, use the awx-manage utility.

Procedure
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  1. The awx-manage utility supports the following options: 
    awx-manage host_metric --csv
  2. This command produces host metric data in CSV format, a host metrics summary file, and a cluster info file.
  3. To package all the files into a single tar file for distribution and sharing, use: 
    awx-manage host_metric --tarball
  4. To specify the number of rows (<n>) to output to each file: 
    awx-manage host_metric --tarball --rows_per_file <n>
  5. Automation Analytics then receives and uses the JSON file.

Deleting Hosts automated using API endpoint
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You can soft delete hosts that have been automated in automation controller using the host metric API endpoint.

The API lists only non-deleted records and are sortable by last_automation and used_in_inventories columns.

To soft delete hosts, use:

api/v2/host_metric <n> DELETE

A monthly scheduled task automatically deletes jobs that uses hosts from the Host Metric table that were last automated more than a year ago.