Three Services to Operationalize RHEL | Modernizing RHEL Management 04

We got ambitious this week and crammed three services into one episode: Advisor, Policy, and Drift. John started a Postgres workload on our miniseries system, reran the Insights client, and watched Advisor immediately recommend the tuned best practices, then we built a custom policy and compared systems with Drift. It was a lot, but it shows how these services turn raw system facts into things you can actually act on.

A few things worth carrying away from this one:

• Advisor is the OG service, and it is still the workhorse. It gave us step-by-step fixes tailored to our exact RHEL version, plus a playbook to apply them. The pathways view especially caught my eye, since it batches several fixes behind one action like a kernel update.
• Policy lets you self-identify what matters to you. Since you cannot write your own Advisor rules, Policy is how you flag your own conditions, like a missing owner tag on a cloud instance, and get notified over email, Slack, ServiceNow, and more.
• Drift answers the “it worked Friday” question. Comparing a system to a baseline or to its own historical profile, you can see exactly what changed, down to package versions, and export it to hand off.

Everything here runs off the same system facts Insights already collects, and one reminder from John: this is analytics, not real-time monitoring.