Management Techniques 101 | Modernizing RHEL Management 01

This is where our whole Modernizing RHEL Management miniseries begins. John Spinks and I sat down to answer the question a lot of folks keep hearing from a colleague or their Red Hat account team: what actually is this Red Hat Insights thing, and should I use it? Today is deliberately a groundwork episode, so we set the context before the demos really kick off next week.

A few things worth carrying away from this one:

• Insights lives inside the hybrid cloud console, and the two are not the same thing. I found it helps to think of console.redhat.com as the platform and Insights as a tenant that borrows shared features like role-based access control and notifications.
• You are not handing Red Hat all your data. John walked through a --no-upload collection and it was about 4.5 MB uncompressed. I compared that to the multi-gigabyte SOS reports from my sysadmin days and my mind was at ease. You can also obfuscate host names and IPs or build a redaction list.
• Insights is included with your RHEL subscription. I keep coming back to this because it surprises people. Even the free developer subscription gets you Insights, so all of my home lab systems are already registered.

If today felt a little dry, that was on purpose. We had to level-set so everyone is on the same page before we start building.