Chapter 11. Connecting Red Hat OpenShift to the subscriptions service

If you use Red Hat OpenShift products, the steps you must do to connect the correct data collection tools to the subscriptions service depend on multiple factors. These factors include the installed version of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated, whether you are working in a connected or disconnected environment, and whether you are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS, or both as the operating system for clusters.

The subscriptions service is designed to work with customers who use Red Hat OpenShift in connected environments. One example of this customer profile is using RHOCP 4.1 and later with an Annual subscription with connected clusters. For this customer profile, Red Hat OpenShift has a robust set of tools that can perform the data collection. The connected clusters report data to Red Hat through Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager, Telemetry, and the other monitoring stack tools to supply information to the data pipeline for the subscriptions service.

Customers with disconnected RHOCP 4.1 and later environments can use Red Hat OpenShift as a data collection tool by manually creating each cluster in Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager.

Customers who use Red Hat OpenShift 3.11 can also use the subscriptions service. However, for Red Hat OpenShift version 3.11, the communication with the subscriptions service is enabled through other tools that supply the data pipeline, such as Insights, Satellite, or Red Hat Subscription Management.

For Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.1 or later with Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS

For this profile, cluster architecture is optimized to report data to Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager through the Telemetry tool in the monitoring stack. Therefore, setup of the subscriptions service reporting is essentially confirming that this monitoring tool is active.

For Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.1 or later with a mixed environment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

For this profile, data gathering is affected by the change in the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform reporting models between Red Hat OpenShift major versions 3 and 4. Version 3 relies upon RHEL to report RHEL cluster usage at the node level. This is still the reporting model used for version 4 RHEL nodes. However, the version 4 era reporting model reports Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS usage at the cluster level through Red Hat OpenShift tools.

The tools that are used to gather this data are different. Therefore, the setup of the subscriptions service reporting is to confirm that both tool sets are configured correctly.

For Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform version 3.11

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform version 3.11 reports cluster usage based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux nodes in the cluster. Therefore, for this profile, the subscriptions service reporting uses the standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux data collection tools.