1. Proposed title of this feature request

[RFE] - Granular/dynamic reporting capability of Insights remediations

2. What is the nature and description of the request?

Quite a few Customers love the idea of Insights, but are overwhelmed with the data they see in the tool. Although we market Insights as a tool that will save you time, common customer feedback is:

a) Customers find it difficult to go through the mass amounts of data Insights is generating and relate it to their business tasks.
b) Customer sysadmins find it difficult to articulate this data to their Technical Managers, Security Teams, or Change Control teams for approvals.

They see value in the Insights data, but they don't see Insights as a time saver. They see Insights causing them more work than it's saving them by nature of needing to comb through the massive amounts of Insights data and translate it into something consumable by their various internal teams who may not be technical. I've been seeing this as a large blocker to adoption. Customers turn on Insights, but they're not using any of the data generated because they don't have time to sift through all the data and translate it to others.

This RFE intent is to make the Insights data more consumable and remove a common adoption blocker.


3. Why does the customer need this? (List the business requirements here)

After chatting with several customers and SAs, I've summarized the requests into these use-case examples. Generally speaking, Customers would love to be able to generate a report on a subset of the Insights inventory, to capture the remediation suggestions, risk, etc. just for that particular set of hosts to better align with their internal ITSM change control processes. Some example use cases:

a) Customer wants to remediate some suggested items for their LAB, DEV/TEST, or PROD environments. They want to report from that environment which remediations require a reboot, service restart, package upgrade, etc. so they all could be bundled in the same internal change control. They want to attach this report to their change control ticket, and bring the report to change advisory board meetings to illustrate what changes are being proposed, the benefit to them, and the impact the remediations will have. Currently, they can see some of this data on a host-by-host basis, but they can't report on it from all the hosts that may have that remediation. The executive report is helpful for a broad understanding, but it's not specific enough to accompany an action they want to take.

ie, "Show me what exposure my LAB environment has, then isolate the remediations by level of change impact, so I can group all the remediations that require a reboot in one change ticket & window (high impact), other remediations with a service restart in another change window (medium impact), and the rest in a change window that I can apply during the day (low impact)."

b) Customer wants to remediate a specific recommendation or two, across any environment (DEV/TEST, PROD). Generate a report of what hosts are associated with a subset of remediations, and summarize the impact (service restart, server reboot, etc.) so I can understand what kind of a change window I may need to propose and support with the requisite data my change control teams are going to ask for.

ie, "We're fixing heartbleed 2 across the entire environment, and also bundling in any other SSL related remediation to complete the full gammut of our SSL certificate exposure. I'll need a report that summarizes the server inventory affected and the associated change impact. Will be printing out this report and taking it to several change advisory board meetings and security team meetings for review."


4. Does the customer have any specific time-line dependencies and which release would they like to target (i.e. RHEL5, RHEL6)?

No specific timelines. 

5. Is the sales team involved in this request and do they have any additional input?

Yes. The lack of customizable reporting, or generally any way to make consumption of the Insights data easier, is blocking adoption from customers and further benefit realised from Insights. When we're selling the value of RHEL, the value of Insights is lost if there's too high of a data consumption curve to get started.

6. Would the customer be able to assist in testing this functionality if implemented?

Yes.