Using Insights Operator

The Insights Operator periodically gathers configuration and component failure status and, by default, reports that data every two hours to Red Hat. This information enables Red Hat to assess configuration and deeper failure data than is reported through Telemetry. Users of OKD can display the report in the Insights Advisor service on Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console.

Additional resources

• The Insights Operator is installed and enabled by default. If you need to opt out of remote health reporting, see Opting out of remote health reporting.

• For more information on using Insights Advisor to identify issues with your cluster, see Using Insights to identify issues with your cluster.

Understanding Insights Operator alerts

Insights Operator declares alerts through the Prometheus monitoring system to Alertmanager. You can view these alerts in the Alerting UI accessible through the Administrator perspective and the Developer perspective in the OKD web console.

Currently, Insights Operator sends the following alerts when the conditions are met:

Disabling Insights Operator alerts

You can stop Insights Operator from firing alerts to the cluster Prometheus instance.

1. Navigate to Workloads → Secrets.

2. On the Secrets page, select All Projects from the Project list, and then set Show default projects to on.

3. Select the openshift-config project from the Projects list.

4. Search for the support secret using the Search by name field. If the secret does not exist, click Create → Key/value secret to create it.

5. Click the Options menu , and then click Edit Secret.

6. Click Add Key/Value.

7. Enter disableInsightsAlerts as the key with the value True, and click Save.

After you save the changes, Insights Operator will no longer send alerts to the cluster Prometheus instance.

Downloading your Insights Operator archive

Insights Operator stores gathered data in an archive located in the openshift-insights namespace of your cluster. You can download and review the data that is gathered by the Insights Operator.

Prerequisites

• Access to the cluster as a user with the cluster-admin role.

Procedure

1. Find the name of the running pod for the Insights Operator:

   $ oc get pods --namespace=openshift-insights -o custom-columns=:metadata.name --no-headers  --field-selector=status.phase=Running

2. Copy the recent data archives collected by the Insights Operator:

   $ oc cp openshift-insights/<insights_operator_pod_name>:/var/lib/insights-operator ./insights-data (1)

   1	Replace <insights_operator_pod_name> with the pod name output from the preceding command.

The recent Insights Operator archives are now available in the insights-data directory.

Viewing Insights Operator gather durations

You can view the time it takes for the Insights Operator to gather the information contained in the archive. This helps you to understand Insights Operator resource usage and issues with Insights Advisor.

Prerequisites

• A recent copy of your Insights Operator archive.

Procedure

1. From your archive, open /insights-operator/gathers.json.

   The file contains a list of Insights Operator gather operations:

       {
         "name": "clusterconfig/authentication",
         "duration_in_ms": 730, (1)
         "records_count": 1,
         "errors": null,
         "panic": null
       }

   1	duration_in_ms is the amount of time in milliseconds for each gather operation.

2. Inspect each gather operation for abnormalities.

Disabling the Insights Operator gather operations

You can disable the Insights Operator gather operations. Disabling the gather operations gives you the ability to increase privacy for your organization as Insights Operator will no longer gather and send Insights cluster reports to Red Hat. This will disable Insights analysis and recommendations for your cluster without affecting other core functions that require communication with Red Hat such as cluster transfers. You can view a list of attempted gather operations for your cluster from the /insights-operator/gathers.json file in your Insights Operator archive. Be aware that some gather operations only occur when certain conditions are met and might not appear in your most recent archive.

Prerequisites

• You are logged in to the OKD web console as a user with cluster-admin role.

Procedure

1. Navigate to Administration → CustomResourceDefinitions.

2. On the CustomResourceDefinitions page, use the Search by name field to find the InsightsDataGather resource definition and click it.

3. On the CustomResourceDefinition details page, click the Instances tab.

4. Click cluster, and then click the YAML tab.

5. To disable all the gather operations, edit the InsightsDataGather configuration file:

   apiVersion: config.openshift.io/v1alpha1
   kind: InsightsDataGather
   metadata:
   ....
   spec: (1)
     gatherConfig:
       disabledGatherers:
         - all (2)

   1	The spec parameter specifies gather configurations.
   2	The all value disables all gather operations.

   To disable individual gather operations, enter their values under the disabledGatherers key:

   spec:
     gatherConfig:
       disabledGatherers:
         - clusterconfig/container_images (1)
         - clusterconfig/host_subnets
         - workloads/workload_info

   1	Example individual gather operation

6. Click Save.

   After you save the changes, the Insights Operator gather configurations are updated and the operations will no longer occur.

Configuring Insights Operator

You can configure Insights Operator to meet the needs of your organization. The Insights Operator is configured using a combination of the default configurations in the pod.yaml file in the Insights Operator Config directory and the configurations stored in the support secret in the openshift-config namespace. The support secret does not exist by default and must be created when adding custom configurations for the first time. Configurations in the support secret override the defaults set in the pod.yaml file.

The table below describes the available configuration attributes:

This procedure describes how to set custom Insights Operator configurations.

Prerequisites

• You are logged in to the OKD web console as a user with cluster-admin role.

Procedure

1. Navigate to Workloads → Secrets.

2. On the Secrets page, select All Projects from the Project list, and then set Show default projects to on.

3. Select the openshift-config project from the Project list.

4. Search for the support secret using the Search by name field. If it does not exist, click Create → Key/value secret to create it.

5. Click the Options menu for the secret, and then click Edit Secret.

6. Click Add Key/Value.

7. Enter an attribute name with an appropriate value (see table above), and click Save.

8. Repeat the above steps for any additional configurations.