Manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 with Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Satellite

Managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL) requires simple and flexible tools and capabilities that cater to the specific needs of your environment. Red Hat provides exactly that, with a portfolio of management tools. This article introduces you to the newest and most exciting management features, focusing on Red Hat Insights, Red Hat Satellite and integrated management options within RHEL 10.

How it all works together

Red Hat has a suite of management tools and products that provide comprehensive control over and visibility into your RHEL environment. This includes built-in management capabilities within RHEL with tools like system roles and web console, Red Hat Insights for proactive analytics and remediations and Red Hat Satellite for large-scale, disconnected or air-gapped deployments. All of these can be used independently, but when combined together with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, they further enhance the experience, providing the very best management and automation solutions to meet any requirements for any environment.

Red Hat Insights in on-premise environments

Red Hat Insights advisor is now available in fully disconnected and air-gapped environments for Satellite customers. This means you can access advisor's configuration recommendations and remediations without sharing any data outside your network. Initially starting with advisor, we're working to make additional Insights capabilities available offline for Satellite customers soon. Get started here

Red Hat Satellite

Red Hat Satellite simplifies the deployment, lifecycle management and patching of RHEL systems. Notable features in the latest release include support for image mode for RHEL, with provisioning, client management and registry distribution for systems created with image mode. This enables management of image-based systems by giving visibility into booted container images, distinguishing between package and image mode hosts and offering bootc remote execution. This unifies the workflows for traditional and container-native RHEL deployments, letting anyone take advantage of image mode for RHEL. Learn more about the Satellite 6.17 and all it has to offer here. 

If you're working in an environment with low, intermittent, or no internet connectivity, you can now reference Red Hat subscriber content anywhere using the Offline Knowledge Portal. Gone are the days of slowly copying content from one internet-connected machine to another disconnected system! The Offline Knowledge Portal includes all the information you need to run and maintain Red Hat products:

• Product documentation titles
• Knowledgebase solutions and articles
• Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)
• Errata (content)
• Product lifecycles
• Security Data API
• Pages from the Customer Portal
• A search interface for all content

Baked-in RHEL Management

RHEL 10 includes management features that are built directly into the operating system. Both web console and system roles have been part of RHEL for a number of years now. My favorite part of RHEL 10 is RHEL Lightspeed, specifically the command-line assistant, which combines decades of RHEL expertise with AI technologies to help you scale and increase your expertise on your Linux systems right from a terminal.

c "Help me figure out why this system is slow to boot"
+ Asking RHEL Lightspeed

To diagnose slow boot times in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), you can use the  systemd-analyze command set. Here's how you can proceed:

1. Check the overall boot time: Use the command systemd-analyze time. This will give you an overview of the total time taken for the last successful boot.

2. Identify services causing delays: To pinpoint which services are contributing to the boot time, use the command systemd-analyze blame. This command lists all services in descending order based on the time they took to initialize during the last boot. The service at the top of the list is the one taking the most time to start.

3. Examine critical boot dependencies: If your boot process is waiting for certain services to start, you can identify these dependencies with systemd-analyze critical-chain. This command shows the units at critical points where the boot process waits for dependencies to be satisfied. For example, if postfix.service depends on network.target and network.target depends on network.service, you'll see this dependency chain.

Remember to review the output of these commands to understand which services are causing the delay and consider disabling unnecessary services that start at boot to improve boot times. Always ensure that disabling services does not adversely affect system functionality.

For more detailed guidance and additional optimization strategies, refer to the Red Hat Knowledgebase article at [https://access.redhat.com/solutions/2478981 (https://access.redhat.com/solutions/2478981).
Always review AI-generated content prior to use.

Next steps

To experience the RHEL Lightspeed command-line-assistant package for yourself, try the solve problems with the command line assistant interactive lab. Enjoy what Insights has to offer inside of Satellite 6.17 by upgrading your Satellite server, or give it a try with the Satellite basics lab.