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Red Hat Satellite is a tool used by system administrators to aid in deployment, configuration, and maintenance of their Red Hat Linux landscape across several environments. This application is critical for IT operations, as it is used for: content management such as system patching and maintenance; lifecycle management by promoting changes from one environment to the next; remote management and provisioning for streamlined operations; capacity management for managing package subscriptions and Red Hat licensing; and much more. While Satellite itself does provide the capability to alert and notify on certain components, there is of course a lot more value in having that telemetry alongside other observability data in a tool like Datadog so users can correlate Satellite related issues with other possible issues within their environment. RapDev’s Red Hat Satellite integration for Datadog makes it easy for Linux administrators to keep their environments well maintained, secure, and operating at peak efficiency while reducing administrative overhead.
The first core component of monitoring Satellite installations with this integration is done via Datadog’s OpenMetrics functionality and a little customization on top. This data is mostly related to core system performance, containing metrics related to Satellite’s ruby backend garbage collections, HTTP requests with their durations and status codes, successful vs failed vs brute force lock UI logins, and more. With the out-of-the-box provided RapDev RedHat Satellite OpenMetrics Dashboard and recommended monitors for the OpenMetrics connection and HTTP 5xx errors, Linux administrators can swiftly begin tracking and identifying issues within their Satellite installation.
The second core component of this integration utilizes the Satellite REST API to extract information related to core pieces of Satellite maintenance such as katello and foreman component statuses, content hosts, lifecycle environments, content views, activation keys, subscriptions, errata, and repositories. The RapDev RedHat Satellite Inventory dashboard, also included with the integration, contains several grouped widget views to simply display the entire inventory of Satellite components. Here, Linux administrators can track their Satellite capacity by viewing most utilized subscriptions and activation keys, view number of content hosts in specific states so they can troubleshoot and pinpoint issues, and generally observe what is living within their Satellite environment.
In addition to the inventory information, this dashboard also displays information about repository syncs, their duration, and their ending result, helping drive security and compliance by ensuring packages remain up-to-date.
Foreman tasks within Satellite are administrative tasks centered around provisioning, lifecycle, and content management. Because these tasks interact with and maintain systems running production applications, it's extremely important that these tasks are well-monitored for their duration and status to ensure end system stability and measure security compliance. The third dashboard shipped with this integration can drive this level OF observability by allowing the monitoring of Foreman task and job invocation states, durations, and end results so administrators can be notified when their important security updates, machine provisioning, or other important tasks are not operating as they should.
Also contained with the Red Hat Satellite integration by RapDev is a log pipeline that parses and processes Red Hat Satellite logs for quick out-of-the-box analysis. The log pipeline contains several nested pipelines for different Satellite components including Foreman, Candlepin, and Pulp. In addition to parsing these logs directly from the Satellite application, the provided pipeline also contains parsers to extract information from Goferd logs on client systems registered to Satellite, extending the power of the integration to more than just the Satellite installation alone.
The Red Hat Satellite integration by RapDev allows Linux admins to bring yet another core piece of their IT infrastructure under the power of Datadog’s observability capabilities. Interested in trialing the integration? Check it out in the Datadog Marketplace!
*This isn't the integration you're looking for? Missing a critical feature for your organization? Drop RapDev a note at chat@rapdev.io, and we'll build it!!*
