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Simple Content Access entitlements with Insights Operator

Insights Operator automates the import of Simple Content Access (SCA) entitlement certificates every 8 hours. These Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM) certificates allow the cluster to authenticate with the Red Hat Content Delivery Network (CDN) to access subscription-governed content. SCA supports multi-architecture clusters by generating architecture-specific secrets, such as amd64 or arm64, in the openshift-config-managed namespace to ensure compatibility across all worker node types.

Additional resources

Simple Content Access entitlement synchronization

Simple Content Access (SCA) simplifies subscription management by removing the requirement to manually attach entitlement keys to individual nodes. Insights Operator facilitates this by automatically retrieving and storing certificates as secrets within the openshift-config-managed namespace. These certificates allow the cluster to authenticate with Red Hat content repositories for operations such as entitled builds.

Entitlement secrets refresh automatically every 8 hours. While older configurations used a support secret in the openshift-config namespace, Insights Operator now prioritizes the insights-config ConfigMap in the openshift-insights namespace if both exist.

Simple content access must be enabled in Red Hat Subscription Management for the importing to function.

Architecture-specific entitlement secrets

The certificates generated by the Insights Operator are based on the worker node architectures that are detected within the cluster. The two types of supported clusters include single-architecture clusters and multi-architecture clusters.

Single-architecture clusters: When all worker nodes use the same architecture, a single secret named etc-pki-entitlement is created.

Multi-architecture clusters: When worker nodes use different architectures, such as a mix of x86_64 and aarch64, a secret is created for each architecture present. These secrets use architecture-specific suffixes, such as etc-pki-entitlement-amd64 or etc-pki-entitlement-arm64.

Verify and manage entitlement secrets

To verify the imported entitlement secrets, list architecture-specific secrets and change the import behavior with the Insights Operator configuration.

Prerequisites

  • You have cluster-admin permissions for the OKD cluster.

  • You have set Simple Content Access (SCA) to Enabled in the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console or your Red Hat Satellite instance.

  • You have registered the cluster with Red Hat OpenShift Cluster Manager and have an active connection to the internet or a proxy to reach Red Hat services.

  • You have confirmed that the insights-config ConfigMap exists in the openshift-insights namespace.

Procedure

  • To list the secrets in the openshift-config-managed namespace, run the following command in a terminal:

    $ oc get secrets -n openshift-config-managed | grep etc-pki-entitlement
Verification

  • Verify that the secrets match the cluster architecture (for example, -amd64 or -arm64) by checking the output of the list command to ensure the relevant secrets are present. The output shows secrets that include the name of the cluster’s architecture, and look similar to the following:

    etc-pki-entitlement                 Opaque                    2      28h
etc-pki-entitlement-amd64           Opaque                    2      88s
etc-pki-entitlement-arm64           Opaque                    2      88s

Configuring simple content access import interval

You can configure how often the Insights Operator imports the simple content access (sca) entitlements by using the insights-config ConfigMap object in the openshift-insights namespace. The entitlement import normally occurs every eight hours, but you can shorten this sca interval if you update your simple content access configuration in the insights-config ConfigMap object.

This procedure describes how to update the import interval to two hours (2h). You can specify hours (h) or hours and minutes, for example: 2h30m.

Prerequisites

  • Remote health reporting is enabled, which is the default.

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

  • The insights-config ConfigMap object exists in the openshift-insights namespace.

Procedure

  1. Go to Workloads → ConfigMaps and select Project: openshift-insights.

  2. Click on the insights-config ConfigMap object to open it.

  3. Click Actions and select Edit ConfigMap.

  4. Click the YAML view radio button.

  5. Set the sca attribute in the file to interval: 2h to import content every two hours.

    apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
# ...
data:
  config.yaml: |
    sca:
      interval: 2h
# ...

  6. Click Save. The insights-config config-map details page opens.

  7. Verify that the value of the config.yaml sca attribute is set to interval: 2h.

Disabling simple content access import

You can disable the importing of simple content access entitlements by using the insights-config ConfigMap object in the openshift-insights namespace.

Prerequisites

  • Remote health reporting is enabled, which is the default.

  • You are logged in to the OKD web console as cluster-admin.

  • The insights-config ConfigMap object exists in the openshift-insights namespace.

Procedure

  1. Go to Workloads → ConfigMaps and select Project: openshift-insights.

  2. Click the insights-config ConfigMap object to open it.

  3. Click Actions and select Edit ConfigMap.

  4. Click YAML view.

  5. In the file, set the sca attribute to disabled: true.

    apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
# ...
data:
  config.yaml: |
    sca:
      disabled: true
# ...

  6. Click Save. The insights-config config-map details page opens.

  7. Verify that the value of the config.yaml sca attribute is set to disabled: true.

Enabling a previously disabled simple content access import

If the importing of simple content access entitlements is disabled, the Insights Operator does not import simple content access entitlements. You can change this behavior.

Prerequisites

  • Remote health reporting is enabled, which is the default.

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

  • The insights-config ConfigMap object exists in the openshift-insights namespace.

Procedure

  1. Go to Workloads → ConfigMaps and select Project: openshift-insights.

  2. Click on the insights-config ConfigMap object to open it.

  3. Click Actions and select Edit ConfigMap.

  4. Click the YAML view radio button.

  5. In the file, set the sca attribute to disabled: false.

    apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
# ...
data:
  config.yaml: |
    sca:
      disabled: false
# ...

  6. Click Save. The insights-config config-map details page opens.

  7. Verify that the value of the config.yaml sca attribute is set to disabled: false.