Chapter 2. Requirements and your responsibilities

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:

You must meet the following requirements for Red Hat Ansible management:

Red Hat Lightspeed as a data collection tool is ideal for the always-connected customer. If you fit this profile, you are interested in using Red Hat Lightspeed 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 Red Hat Lightspeed 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 Red Hat Lightspeed as your data collection tool becomes even more convenient.

However, using Red Hat Lightspeed as the data collection tool is not ideal if the Red Hat Lightspeed agent cannot connect directly to the console.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, Red Hat Lightspeed 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 Hybrid Cloud Console services. 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 Red Hat Lightspeed agent or the Subscription Manager agent for data collection.

For example, you might be able to connect to the Hybrid Cloud Console directly, but you might find the connection and maintenance of a per-organization Satellite installation is more convenient than the per-system installation of Red Hat Lightspeed. The use of Satellite also enables you to inspect the information that is being sent to the Hybrid Cloud Console 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 Hybrid Cloud Console 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 Hybrid Cloud Console. 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 Hybrid Cloud Console services 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 Red Hat Lightspeed, Red Hat Subscription Management, or Satellite.

The Red Hat OpenShift portfolio also 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 with RHEL or Satellite. For RHEL, the subscription attributes are known as system purpose.

You should set the system purpose 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 Hybrid Cloud Console tools at different intervals, or heartbeats, and because the subscriptions service shows some information 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.

Set the subscription attributes with RHEL

You can use a few different methods to set the system purpose values, depending on whether you set them at RHEL installation or configuration time, whether you are installing RHEL interactively or automatically, and whether you are setting system purpose from a command line interface or with another method.

For more specific guidance related to the installation or configuration process that you are following, see the system purpose information in these {RHELNameShort} 9 guides, or see similar guides in the applicable version of {RHELNameShort}:

Set the subscription attributes from Satellite

For Satellite, the methods to set subscription attributes are described in instructions for editing the system purpose of a single host or multiple hosts:

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.

Set 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.

Set 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:

Set subscription attributes for other Red Hat OpenShift subscriptions

Some offerings are of one subscription type only, for example, Red Hat OpenShift AI or Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes. Therefore, setting subscription attributes is not required.

Currently, the only Red Hat Ansible offering that is tracked by the subscriptions service is Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform as a managed service. The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform managed service offering is of one subscription type only. Therefore, setting subscription attributes is not required.