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Chapter 6. How to set subscription attributes
Red Hat subscriptions combine technology with use cases to help procurement and technical teams make the best purchasing and deployment decisions for their business needs. When the same product is offered in two different subscriptions, these use cases differentiate between the options. They inform the decision-making process at the time of purchase and remain associated with the subscription throughout its life cycle to help determine how the subscription is used.
Red Hat provides a method for you to associate use case information with products through the application of subscription attributes. These subscription attributes can be supplied at product installation time or as an update to the product.
The subscriptions service helps you to align your software deployments with the use cases that support them and compare actual consumption to the capacity provided by the subscription profile of your account. Proper, automated maintenance of the subscription attributes for your inventory is important to the accuracy of the subscriptions service reporting.
Subscription attributes can generally be organized into the following use cases:
- technical use case
- Attributes that describe how the product will be used upon deployment. Examples include role information for RHEL used as a server or alternatively used as a workstation.
- business use case
- Attributes that describe how the product will be used in relation to your business environment and workflows. Examples include usage as part of a production environment or alternatively as part of a disaster recovery environment.
- operational use case
- Attributes that describe various operational characteristics such as how the product will be supported. Examples include a service level agreement (SLA) of premium, or a service type of L1-L3.
The subscription attributes might be configured from the operating system or its management tools, or they might be configured from settings within the product itself. Collectively, these subscription attributes might be known as system purpose, subscription settings, or similar names across all of these tools.
Subscription attributes are used by the Cloud Services platform tools such as the inventory tool to build the most accurate usage profile for products in your inventory. The subscriptions tool uses the subscription attributes found and reported by these other tools to filter data about your subscriptions, enabling you to view this data with more granularity. For example, filtering your RHEL subscriptions to show only those with an SLA of premium could help you determine the current usage of those premium subscriptions compared to your overall capacity for premium subscriptions.
The quality of subscription attribute data can greatly affect the accuracy and usefulness of the subscriptions service data. Therefore, a best practice is to ensure that these attributes are properly set, both for current use and any possible future expansion of subscription attribute use within the subscriptions service.
6.1. Setting subscription attributes for RHEL
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:
- See the section about completing post-installation tasks in the Performing a Standard RHEL 8 Installation guide.
- See the section about configuring system purpose in the System Design Guide.
The syspurpose command line tool has also been added to RHEL 7.7 and later.
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:
- See the section about managing subscription usage in the Using Red Hat Subscription Management guide.
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:
- See the section about administering hosts in the Managing Hosts guide.
6.2. Setting subscription attributes for Red Hat OpenShift
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.
- From the Clusters view, select a cluster to display the cluster details.
- Click Edit Subscription Settings on the cluster details page or from the Actions menu.
- Make any needed changes to the values for the subscription attributes and then save those changes.
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:
For core-based nodes:
# echo '{"ocm.units":"Cores/vCPU"}' | sudo tee /etc/rhsm/facts/openshift-units.factsFor socket-based nodes:
# echo '{"ocm.units":"Sockets"}' | sudo tee /etc/rhsm/facts/openshift-units.facts
6.3. Setting subscription attributes for Red Hat Cloud Services
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.
