Chapter 2. Using the Insights for OpenShift advisor service
Chapter 2. Using the Insights for OpenShift advisor service The Insights advisor service repeatedly analyzes the data collected by the Insights Operator. You can view and manage reports showing advisor results for your OpenShift cluster in the advisor service GUI on the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. 2.1. Displaying potential issues with your cluster This section describes how to view advisor results in the Insights for OpenShift GUI. Note that the Insights Operator repeatedly analyzes your cluster and shows the latest results in the Insights for OpenShift advisor service. These results can change if you fix an issue or a new issue has been detected, for example. Prerequisites Your cluster is registered with OpenShift Cluster Manager. Remote health reporting is enabled, which is the default. You are logged in to the Hybrid Cloud Console. Procedure Navigate to OpenShift > Advisor > Recommendations . Depending on the result, you may see one of the following messages: No matching recommendations found , if Insights did not identify any issues. A list of issues Insights has detected, grouped by risk (low, moderate, important, and critical). No clusters yet , if Insights has not yet analyzed the cluster. The analysis starts shortly after the cluster has been installed, registered, and connected to the internet. If any issues are displayed, click the > icon in front of the entry for more details. Depending on the issue, the details can also contain a link to more information from Red Hat about the issue. 2.2. Displaying all Insights for OpenShift advisor service recommendations The Recommendations view, by default, only displays the recommendations that are detected on your clusters. However, you can view all of the recommendations contained in the Insights for OpenShift archive. Prerequisites Remote health reporting is enabled, which is the default. Your cluster is registered with OpenShift Cluster Manager. You are logged in to the Hybrid Cloud Console. Procedure Navigate to OpenShift > Advisor > Recommendations . Click the X icons to the Clusters Impacted and Status filters. You can now browse through all of the recommendations against which your cluster is scanned. 2.3. Filtering advisor recommendations to see your most critical issues The Insights for OpenShift advisor service can return a large number of recommendations. To focus on your most critical recommendations, you can apply filters to the advisor service recommendations list to remove low-priority recommendations. By default, filters are set to only show enabled recommendations that are impacting one or more clusters. To view all or disabled recommendations in the Insights library, you can customize the filters. To apply a filter, select a filter type and then set its value based on the options that are available in the drop-down list. You can apply multiple filters to the list of recommendations. You can set the following filter types: Name: Search for a recommendation by name. Total risk: Select one or more values from Critical , Important , Moderate , and Low indicating the likelihood and the severity of a negative impact on a cluster. Impact: Select one or more values from Critical , High , Medium , and Low indicating the potential impact to the continuity of cluster operations. Likelihood: Select one or more values from Critical , High , Medium , and Low indicating the potential for a negative impact to a cluster if the recommendation comes to fruition. Category: Select one or more categories from Service Availability , Performance , Fault Tolerance , Security , and Best Practice to focus your attention on. Status: Click a radio button to show enabled recommendations (default), disabled recommendations, or all recommendations. Clusters impacted: Set the filter to show recommendations currently impacting one or more clusters, non-impacting recommendations, or all recommendations. Risk of change: Select one or more values from High , Moderate , Low , and Very low indicating the risk that the implementation of the resolution could have on cluster operations. 2.3.1. Applying filters to the list of advisor recommendations As an OpenShift cluster administrator, you can filter the advisor recommendations that are displayed on the recommendations list. By applying filters, you can reduce the number of reported recommendations and concentrate on your highest priority recommendations. The following procedure demonstrates how to set and remove Category filters; however, the procedure is applicable to any of the filter types and respective values. Prerequisites You are logged in to the Hybrid Cloud Console. Procedure Navigate to OpenShift > Advisor > Recommendations . In the main, filter-type drop-down list, select the Category filter type. Expand the filter-value drop-down list and select the checkbox to each category of recommendation you want to view. Leave the checkboxes for unnecessary categories clear. Optional: Apply additional filters to further refine the list. Only recommendations from the selected categories are shown in the list. Verification After applying filters, you can view the updated recommendations list. The applied filters are added to the default filters. 2.3.2. Removing filters from the advisor recommendations list You can apply multiple filters to the list of recommendations. When ready, you can remove them individually or completely reset them. Removing filters individually Click the X icon to each filter, including the default filters, to remove them individually. Removing all non-default filters Click Reset filters to remove only the filters that you applied, leaving the default filters in place. 2.4. Disabling advisor recommendations You can disable specific recommendations that affect your clusters, so that they no longer appear in your reports. It is possible to disable a recommendation for a single cluster or all of your clusters. Note Disabling a recommendation for all of your current clusters also disables that recommendation on all future clusters. Prerequisites Remote health reporting is enabled, which is the default. Your cluster is registered with Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager. You are logged in to the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. Procedure Navigate to OpenShift > Advisor > Recommendations . Disable the recommendation for a single cluster: Click the name of the recommendation to disable. You are directed to the details page for the recommendation. Click the the options icon (...) for that cluster, and then click Disable recommendation for cluster . Enter a justification note and click Save . Disable the recommendation for all of your clusters: Click the name of the recommendation to disable. You are directed to the details page for the recommendation. Click Actions > Disable recommendation . Enter a justification note and click Save . Verification If you disabled the recommendation for all clusters, go to OpenShift > Advisor > Recommendations and search for the recommendation. If the procedure was successful, you will not see the recommendation in the search result. If you disabled the recommendation for an individual cluster(s), got to the Recommendations page and search for the recommendation. Click on the recommendation and search for the cluster ID for the cluster on which it was disabled. If the procedure was successful, you will not see your cluster in the list of clusters affected by the recommendation. 2.5. Enabling a previously disabled advisor recommendation When an Insights advisor recommendation is disabled for all clusters, you will no longer see it on the list of recommendations. You can reenable the recommendation so that your clusters are scanned for it. Prerequisites Remote health reporting is enabled, which is the default. Your cluster is registered with Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager. You are logged in to the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. Procedure Navigate to OpenShift > Advisor > Recommendations . Filter the recommendations by Status > Disabled . Locate the recommendation to enable. Click the the options icon (...), and then click Enable recommendation . 2.6. Displaying the Insights advisor status in the OpenShift web console Red Hat Insights for OpenShift repeatedly analyzes your cluster and you can display the status of identified potential issues of your cluster in the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform web console. This status shows the number of issues in the different categories and, for further details, links to the reports in the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. Prerequisites Your cluster is registered with OpenShift Cluster Manager. Remote health reporting is enabled, which is the default. You are logged in to the OpenShift Container Platform web console. Procedure Navigate to Home Overview in the OpenShift Container Platform web console. Click Insights on the Status card. The pop-up window lists potential issues grouped by risk. Click the individual categories or View all recommendations in Insights ADVISOR to display more details. 2.7. Using update-risk assessment to identify and mitigate cluster-update risks Update-risk assessment uses machine learning developed in collaboration with IBM Research to compare the recent state of the cluster with conditions known to cause updates to fail, including failing operator conditions, alerts, and other metrics. The advisor service identifies clusters with update risks, and also shows you alerts and components that need attention. You can use the update-risk feature to generate a checklist of issues to fix before beginning a cluster update. Complete the following steps to view any update risks in your clusters. Prerequisites Cluster is connected to the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console using instructions in OpenShift, Remote Health Monitoring documentation, Enabling remote health reporting . Cluster has sent data to Red Hat within the last two hours. You are logged into the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console . Procedure Navigate to the Advisor clusters page in the Hybrid Cloud Console. Select a cluster with the Update risk label. The label is visible with the cluster name or ID. Click the cluster name to open the cluster details page. If no risks exist for the cluster, a banner displays the message, "No known update risks identified for this cluster." If the cluster has not checked in for more than two hours, the banner message says "Warning alert: Update risks are not currently available. This cluster has gone more than two hours without sending metrics. Check the cluster's web console if you think that this is incorrect." Click the Update risks tab. View alerts or cluster operator risks for the cluster. Click an alert to open the Alert details page in the Red Hat OpenShift web console. Click a cluster operator to open the in-cluster, ClusterOperator details page in the Red Hat OpenShift web console. For more information about alerts, see OpenShift documentation, Getting information about alerts, silences, and alerting rules . Additional resources Red Hat Insights Upgrade Risks for Red Hat OpenShift (Red Hat blog) Remote health monitoring with connected clusters Managing clusters Getting information about alerts, silences, and alerting rules 2.8. Identifying workload recommendations for namespaces in your clusters Workload recommendations alert OpenShift cluster administrators to misconfigurations within specific namespaces in managed and on-premises clusters. Cluster administration and maintenance can be hampered by incorrectly configured applications on nodes in a cluster. Misconfigurations of cloud-native applications are not unusual and can block cluster maintenance tasks or potentially cause disruption to operations. Workload recommendations are essentially best practices that are applicable to all cloud-native Kubernetes applications; however, they must be resolved by developers in the namespace. The Insights for OpenShift advisor service provides workload recommendations for specific objects in namespaces in clusters. Cluster administrators can view the potentially disruptive workload recommendation details - including cluster, namespace, and affected-object IDs, and steps to resolve the issue - then alert developers in the namespace so that they can apply the resolutions. By sharing workload recommendation information with developers and encouraging the adoption of deployment best practices, cluster administrators can effectively resolve inhibitors to more effective cluster operations, performance, and security. Prerequisites You have cluster-admin access to at least one cluster in your infrastructure. You must have login access to the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. Additional resources Workload recommendations are based on data provided by the Deployment Validation Operator. For more information, see Using the Deployment Validation Operator in your Red Hat Insights for OpenShift workflow . If you are unable to log into your organization's account on the Hybrid Cloud Console, you may need to request access from an Organization Administrator for your Red Hat account. They will then need to grant you access by going to User Access > Red Hat Access Requests and clicking Create request . 2.8.1. Viewing workload recommendations for namespaces in your cluster You can view workload best-practice recommendations for specific objects in namespaces in your clusters. Procedure Go to OpenShift > Advisor > Workloads . Select a cluster/namespace. This opens the namespace details page, including recommendations for this namespace. Note You can use the filtering function to search by cluster name or namespace name. Click the arrow to a recommendation to see the following information about the issue: A description of the detected issue Steps to resolve the issue on affected objects in the namespace Identifiers for affected-objects in the namespace Additional resources and information Click on View all objects to view a list of all of the objects affected by the recommendation in this namespace. 2.9. Using the Deployment Validation Operator in your Red Hat Insights for OpenShift workflow The Deployment Validation Operator validates on-premises and managed clusters against a curated collection of KubeLinter checks. These checks implement best practices for Kubernetes-native workloads, helping to ensure that applications are optimized for the operational stability of the cluster. The Insights Operator gathers Deployment Validation Operator checks every two hours by default and presents data in the Insights advisor service. If the Deployment Validation Operator detects issues, cluster administrators can view resolutions in the advisor service. If the Deployment Validation Operator detects no issues, no results are visible in the advisor service. Curated KubeLinter checks The Deployment Validation Operator checks a curated, limited collection of all of the available KubeLinter checks. The Deployment Validation Operator does not execute the whole list of available KubeLinter checks. advisor recommendations do not exist for all available KubeLinter checks. Supported OpenShift Container Platform versions All Red Hat-supported versions of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, OpenShift Dedicated, and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS support the Deployment Validation Operator. Important Managed OpenShift clusters have the Deployment Validation Operator installed and operational, by default. On-premesis clusters admins must download and install the Deployment Validation Operator from OperatorHub, and can modify the default list of checks. Additional resources Deployment Validation Operator technical documentation in GitHub 2.9.1. The Deployment Validation Operator on managed OpenShift clusters The Deployment Validation Operator is already installed and operational on managed OpenShift clusters. This includes clusters on OpenShift Dedicated and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS. Deployment Validation Operator configuration The Deployment Validation Operator for managed clusters comes preconfigured, by default. The Deployment Validation Operator configuration file contains the default, curated set of KubeLinter checks and is not editable. Deployment Validation Operator updates On managed clusters, the Deployment Validation Operator updates automatically. 2.9.2. The Deployment Validation Operator on on-premises OpenShift clusters Administrators of on-premises clusters must install the Deployment Validation Operator from OperatorHub in the OpenShift web console. On-premises cluster administrators can also configure the default set of KubeLinter checks. Note The advisor does not have recommendations for all of the checks that KubeLinter has available. 2.9.2.1. Installing the Deployment Validation Operator on on-premises Openshift clusters You can find the Deployment Validation Operator in OperatorHub and install it from there. Prerequisites You are logged into the Red Hat OpenShift web console as a cluster-admin. Procedure Navigate to Red Hat OpenShift web console > Operators > OperatorHub. In the Search box, start typing "deployment-validation-operator." Click on the DVO card when you see it. The Deployment Validation Operator card displays information about capabilities, configuration, version, and GitHub source files. When you are ready to install the Operator, click Install . Choose the namespace or use the default. Click Install and the Operator installs. You can confirm the installation in the InstalledOperators view. The Deployment Validation Operator is also visible in the Pods and Deployments views for the cluster in the corresponding namespace. 2.9.2.2. Configuring the list of Deployment Validation Operator checks on on-premises clusters Administrators of on-premises OpenShift clusters can change the default list of Deployment Validation Operator checks to focus on specific best practices of interest. Refer to the section, Configuring Checks , in the Deployment Validation Operator technical documentation in GitHub. 2.9.2.3. Updating the Deployment Validation Operator on on-premises clusters You can set the Deployment Validation Operator to automatically update during the installation from OperatorHub. 2.9.3. Viewing Deployment Validation Operator results in the Insights for OpenShift advisor service If the Deployment Validation Operator detects issues, the Overview page for the cluster in the OpenShift web console shows an Insights link with the number of detected issues in the Status information block. Click the link to learn more about the issue and how to resolve it in the advisor service in the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. Note If the latest Deployment Validation Operator returns no issues, you will not see any issues in Insights. Prerequisites You are logged into the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console. Procedure Navigate to the Overview page for the cluster in the OpenShift web console. Look for the Status block, an Insights link, and the number of detected issues. If one or more issues exist, click the Insights link to open the advisor service in the Hybrid Cloud Console. The link takes you to the cluster information page. In the Recommendations tab, you can see the issues detected on the cluster. Click the arrow to view complete information about the issue, including the necessary actions to resolve it. 2.9.4. Viewing the default list of Deployment Validation Operator checks The Deployment Validation Operator checks your cluster against a default list of checks. You can view the list of DVO checks in GitHub. Important Administrators of managed clusters cannot modify the list of default checks, but can view them using the link above.