InterSystems IRIS operations made easy with Red Hat Insights

Red Hat Insights, leveraging the power of its Advisor service, offers Red Hat administrators forward-thinking guidance and timely alerts for their Red Hat systems, drawing upon the collective knowledge and experience of Red Hat's own experts, along with select independent software vendor (ISV) partners.

The Red Hat Insights team has been recently working very closely with our ISV partner, InterSystems, a leading provider of data solutions for healthcare and other industries, to empower Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) system administrators to seamlessly operate InterSystems IRIS through a new set of Advisor recommendations, as informed by InterSystems in their earlier blog post. 

InterSystems IRIS offers a robust, integrated platform for building innovative, intelligent applications that harness the power of generative AI and semantic search technologies. With IRIS’s built-in, AI-driven capabilities, our joint customers can create smart enterprise solutions that analyze and understand diverse types of data, generate insights, and make predictions while ensuring optimal system performance via actionable Advisor recommendations. Insights Advisor assists systems administrators to remediate configuration settings that may degrade InterSystems IRIS performance. 

There are no additional steps required to enable this bespoke integration, except for connecting a RHEL machine running InterSystems IRIS to Red Hat Insights. Our getting started guide contains easy-to-follow instructions on how to connect systems to Red Hat Insights. Red Hat Insights users will now see a new topic called "InterSystems" within the Advisor service, which groups all the individual recommendations which are related to InterSystems products. These are based on years of experience supporting InterSystems IRIS on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. See Figure 1.

Tuning InterSystems IRIS performance

Insights Advisor constantly evaluates several configuration attributes related to HugePages, Transparent HugePages (THP), swappiness, and shmmax kernel parameters for conformance with the InterSystems best practices. This way, Insights Advisor ensures optimal performance of InterSystems IRIS installations. In case it detects incompatibility or contradictory settings, a recommendation will be presented in the Insights user interface, and a new recommendation event is triggered. See Configuring notifications on the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console to learn more. Figure 2 shows one such recommendation.

Preventing failover issues

To ensure high availability and prevent potential failover issues with InterSystems IRIS, Red Hat Insights now recommends setting an arbiter in high-availability deployments of InterSystems IRIS to significantly expand the scope of automatic failover capabilities, allowing for smoother recovery in a broader range of potential failure situations. 

Additionally, the Advisor service suggests enabling the "Freeze on Error" option to prevent data loss in the event of a system failure which prevents writing to journal devices for better integrity and recoverability of the InterSystems IRIS database. 

Finally, separating the primary and alternate journal directories by placing them on distinct storage devices, separated from database and write image journal (WIJ) storage, is also part of the new set of Advisor recommendations. This setup ensures data integrity and recoverability while minimizing downtime.

Every Advisor recommendation provides system administrators details about the detected Red Hat Enterprise Linux version, InterSystems IRIS instance information, and system-specific, step-by-step instructions to remediate the detected issue. See Figure 3. Additional information linked to the InterSystems documentation for further reference is also included. 

New facts available via Insights APIs

Red Hat Insights offers multiple ways of integrating and/or querying its data to seamlessly integrate its findings into your operational workflows. As part of our collaboration with InterSystems, we've introduced three new system facts that allow those who prefer to access their Insights Inventory through APIs to do so: product, instance_name, and version. Those facts are regrouped in a new intersystems attribute as part of the system profile in the inventory.

To query Insights inventory for these new systems facts, you can use the following command:

curl -X 'GET' \
'https://console.redhat.com/api/inventory/v1/hosts/<uuid>/system_profile?per_page=50&page=1&fields%5Bsystem_profile%5D=intersystems' \
  -H 'accept: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer <token>'

Here is an example of a JSON response:

{
  "id": "<uuid>",
  "system_profile": {
    "intersystems": {
      "running_instances": [
        {
          "product": "IRIS",
          "instance_name": "IRIS_INSIGHTS_1",
          "version": "2023.1"
        }
      ],
      "is_intersystems": true
    }
  }
}

Check out the Red Hat Insights API cheat sheet to get started with Insights APIs.

Enable Red Hat Insights with InterSystems today

Registering your systems with Red Hat Insights is very straightforward and typically requires only a single command to be executed. Nevertheless, we offer the registration assistant application, which will help you complete the necessary steps based on your setup. Analysis of InterSystems workloads requires no additional steps and is enabled by default as part of Red Hat Insights.