Wednesday, at the annual Red Hat Summit, the company unveiled the latest version of its predictive analytics tool, Red Hat Insights. The new version brings some key updates that could help with mitigating risk and managing containers and private cloud deployments.

New features include the Insights Action Planner and Insights Early Access Mode. According to a Red Hat press release, the Action Planner “can enable teams to identify and assign remediation tasks individually or in groups. IT organizations can more easily document the remediation process and move from intelligence to action, while remaining compliant with change management policies defined by operations teams. Customers can create their own custom remediation plans as well as utilize Insights recommended plans, tailored to their specific infrastructure and risks.”

Early Access Mode is a new opt-in modality that, “gives users visibility into upcoming new features, allowing users to test out functionality, give feedback, and help shape the evolution of Red Hat Insights. Users can switch between modes, enabling them to test out new innovations without disrupting their existing Insights deployment.”

This release of Red Hat Insights also includes workload analysis for containers and real-time, full-stack analysis of OpenStack-based private clouds and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environments. ­­

The remediation data and guidance for detected problems comes in real time from Red Hat support experiences, based upon the comprehensive and diverse array of situations they see from day-to-day, and the solutions they’ve found successful. Insights advice relies on more than 1,000,000 solved cases with 100,000 validated solutions and 20,000 new enterprise snapshots added nightly.

SEE: Red Hat goes all in on OpenShift and containers at Red Hat Summit 2016 (TechRepublic)

It works via a client application that monitors and communicates system information, securely transmitting it via encryption to centralized Red Hat servers. This information is then analyzed via an empirical process to allow you to view the status, health, and recommended solutions for any issues found with your systems.

Red Hat has also worked with hardware and software vendors to provide specific insights into their products. To protect user data, the company stated in a blog post: “We’ve allowed users with strict data security policies to optionally blacklist and obfuscate sensitive and/or protected information.”

Using Insights requires you to register the host(s) to be monitored with Red Hat Subscription Manager (Red Hat Network Classic is also possible), install an RPM called “redhat-access-insights,” and then register the redhat-access-insights app. The client will then begin sending system information to Red Hat Insights, available via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

In a session on predictive analytics, Red Hat product owner Andrew Hecox elaborated on a few other features coming with Insights:

  • Site-guidance (site-wide trends or security, technical data and deployment agility)
  • Configuration outliers (identify anomalies or “snowflake” systems with non-standard configurations)
  • Application-aware enhancements (application topology / cloud environment awareness)
  • Analytics-driven automation (response automation for better control)

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