Chapter 1. Track your product data with Red Hat Discovery

Red Hat Discovery is an agentless inspection and reporting tool that identifies physical and virtual systems on a network, their operating systems, configuration data, and installed Red Hat products. Use these findings to understand and manage your subscription usage and IT inventory.

The ability to inspect the software and systems that are running on your network improves your ability to understand and report on your subscription usage. Ultimately, this inspection and reporting process is part of the larger system administration task of managing your inventories.

Red Hat Discovery requires the configuration of two basic structures to access IT resources and run the inspection process. A credential contains user access data, such as the username and password or Secure Shell (SSH) key. It provides sufficient authority to run the inspection process on a particular source. A source contains data about a single asset or multiple assets that are to be inspected.

These assets can be physical machines, virtual machines, or containers, identified as hostnames, IP addresses, IP ranges, or subnets. These assets can also be a systems management solution such as vCenter Server or Red Hat Satellite Server, or can be clusters deployed on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

You can save multiple credentials and sources to use with Discovery in various combinations as you run inspection processes, or scans. When you have completed a scan, you can access these facts in the output as a collection of formatted data, or report, to review the results.

By default, the credentials and sources that are created during the use of Red Hat Discovery are encrypted in a database. The values are encrypted with AES-256 encryption. They are decrypted when the Red Hat Discovery server runs a scan with the use of a vault password to access the encrypted values that are stored in the database.

Red Hat Discovery is an agentless inspection tool, so there is no need to install the tool on every source that is to be inspected. However, the system that Discovery is installed on must have access to the systems to be discovered and inspected.

Red Hat Discovery detects specific Red Hat products. For each version or release, the earliest supported version is listed, with later releases indicated as applicable.

If a product has changed names recently so that you might be more familiar with the current name for that product, that name is provided as additional information. No later version is implied by the inclusion of a newer product name unless specific versions of that product are also listed.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Red Hat Application Services products (formerly Red Hat Middleware)

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes

Red Hat Discovery helps you discover your Red Hat product inventory across complex networks. Work with a Red Hat Solution Architect (SA) or Technical Account Manager (TAM) to interpret the generated reports.

You can also work with the Subscription Education and Awareness Program (SEAP) for analysis and assistance.

Although you can install and use Discovery independently and then generate and view report data, the Discovery documentation does not provide any information to help you interpret report results. Red Hat Support can provide some basic assistance related to installation and usage of Discovery. However, the support team does not provide any assistance to help you understand the reports.

The Discovery tool does not automatically share data directly with Red Hat. Instead, you choose whether to prepare and send report data to Red Hat for ingestion by Red Hat tools and services. You can use the Discovery tool locally to scan your network for the Red Hat products that Discovery currently supports and then use the generated reports for your own internal purposes.