The Kubernetes agent has been enhanced to provide discovery and visibility of Red Hat OpenShift operators

IT Asset Management version 2023 R2.4

In this release, the Kubernetes agent can now recognize Red Hat OpenShift operators installed on all worker nodes in a Kubernetes cluster(s) in your environment. When inventory is collected by the Kubernetes agent, information will be mapped over to IT Asset Management and installer evidence created for each worker node in a Kubernetes cluster.

This enhancement is supported by the Standard Flexera Kubernetes inventory agent (often referred to as the "full" Kubernetes inventory agent), and the Lightweight Kubernetes inventory agent. Installer evidence will be updated to reflect new inventory, and inventory that is no longer present will be removed each and every time the Kubernetes agent collects inventory from a Kubernetes cluster(s) in your environment.

Note: Installer evidence will be created per each worker node for all the installed operators in the Kubernetes cluster, and is not restricted to only Red Hat OpenShift operators. However, only Red Hat OpenShift operators will be added to the Application Recognition Library (ARL). For customers that may get value from collecting information on other operators different to Red Hat OpenShift, these customers may need to map the evidence over to the responsible application(s) locally in their instance if they want to make use of it, or submit unrecognized evidence.

Red Hat Openshift subscription levels

At the time of writing, there are three subscription levels available for Red Hat OpenShift operators:
  • Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus
  • Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
  • Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes Engine.
Each level gives access to various different components, and can be licensed in two ways:
  • Core-based (2 cores or 4 vCPUs). This is based on the aggregate number of physical cores or virtual cores (vCPUs) across all the Red Hat OpenShift worker nodes running across all Red Hat OpenShift clusters.
  • Bare-metal socket pair (1-2 sockets with up to 64 cores). This subscription is available only for x86 bare-metal physical nodes where Red Hat OpenShift is installed directly to the hardware, with the exemption of IBM zSystem and Power architectures, which must use core-based subscriptions.

For customer subscriptions, customers pay for cores across all the worker nodes within their Kubernetes cluster. Cores belonging to control plane or infrastructure hosts do not contribute to consumption.

Note: This release only covers recognition of Red Hat OpenShift subscription components in your Kubernetes cluster environments, functionality to calculate license consumption for Red Hat OpenShift operators will come in a future release.

What changes have been made to the Kubernetes agent

To implement this enhancement, two changes were made to the Kubernetes agent:
  • A new class called MGS_KubernetesOlmSubscription was added to the k8s-inventory-clusterId-timestamp.ndi file, to collect installed Red Hat OpenShift information from all worker nodes in your kubernetes cluster(s).
  • A new property called Roles was added to the MGS_KubernetesNode class, to identify which of the nodes in a Kubernetes cluster are worker nodes.

This information is then uploaded as part of the primary Kubernetes resource inventory. For more information on the new MGS_KubernetesOlmSubscription hardware class, see Kubernetes Inventory Uploads in the Gathering FlexNet Inventory user guide.

Viewing Red Hat Openshift operator installer evidence in IT Asset Management

After inventory has been collected by the Kubernetes agent, subscription component data is mapped over. In IT Asset Management, the Cluster ID and Host name can be viewed from the All Containers page (Inventory > All Containers). The Cluster ID is the unique ID of the cluster containing the worker node where the pod runs the container instantiated from the image. The Host name is the name of the Kubernetes worker node. To view installer evidence, click the container host link to open its Inventory Device Properties page, and then click Evidence.

For any Red Hat operator publishers, associated data is specifically mapped across to the publisher Red Hat. For any nodes that have not been identified as a worker node, operator installer evidence is not displayed, but other installer evidence may be displayed.

The following information is mapped over:
  • Operator name—The name of the Red Hat OpenShift operator.
  • Installed cluster service version—The cluster services version of the Red Hat OpenShift operator.
  • Red Hat or the catalog source—The publisher for the installer evidence. In this case, "Red Hat" if the catalog source is "redhat-operators", otherwise the publisher will be whatever the catalog source is.

IT Asset Management (Cloud)

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