How to Identify Inactive Systems and Manage Subscriptions in SUSE Customer Center #

SUSEConnect is a tool to register SLE-based operating systems with SCC or RMT. Registered systems receive updates to installed packages, for example, to increase security of the operating system. With SUSEConnect, you can additionally register extensions and modules that extend the base system functionality.

Tip

This document does not cover general usage of SUSEConnect. To find more basic information about how to register your system, modules and extensions with SUSEConnect, refer to https://documentation.suse.com/sles/html/SLES-all/cha-register-sle.html.

To improve visibility into subscription consumption, SUSEConnect now features a daily “ping”. This ping automatically updates system information in the SUSE Customer Center or RMT, helping you to identify and filter out decommissioned or inactive systems regardless of where they are running or how they are managed; physical or virtual, on-premises or in the cloud, connected to SCC or RMT, or managed by SUSE Multi-Linux Manager. As a result, you can maintain an accurate inventory of active systems and optimize your subscription costs.

To use the extended SUSEConnect functionality, you need to:

We extended SUSEConnect with the new option --keepalive. The command SUSEConnect --keepalive updates the last time that a host contacted SCC or RMT and updates the host's hardware information.

The SUSEConnect package ships with two systemd units:

These units are responsible for keeping the system information up to date with the SCC or RMT, and for providing accurate data about subscription usage.

Note: The timer is enabled automatically

When the SUSEConnect package is installed or updated, and its version is equal to or greater than the one described above, the keep-alive timer is enabled automatically.

3.1 How do I disable the SUSEConnect keep-alive timer? #

  

If you prefer to not have the SUSEConnect keep-alive timer running on your system, you can disable it with systemctl:

> sudo systemctl disable --now suse-connect-keepalive.timer

Once the timer is disabled, subsequent updates to the SUSEConnect package do not re-enable it.

Tip: Re-enabling the keep-alive timer

If you decide to re-enable the disabled keep-alive timer, run the following command:

> sudo systemctl enable --now suse-connect-keepalive.timer

When SUSEConnect reports details about active hosts daily, SCC or RMT collect this information and let you filter out registered inactive hosts. If your hosts are registered against RMT or SUSE Multi-Linux Manager, these registration servers forward the received information to SCC.

When a system is registered directly via SCC, or its registration information is forwarded by RMT or SUSE Multi-Linux Manager, SCC collects the following information:

"sap": [
    {
      "system_id": "DEV",
      "instance_types": [
        "ASCS",
        "D"
      ]
    }
]

{
  "id": 2511,
  "identifier": "sle-module-live-patching",
  "version": "15.2",
  "arch": "x86_64"
}

{
  "identifier":"37191ca7bc6a[...]e5e5e9533109e06fc",
  "data":[
    "00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E7 v3/Xeon E5 v3/Core i7 DMI2 (rev 02)",
    "00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E7 v3/Xeon E5 v3/Core i7 PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 02)",
    ...
  ]
}

{
  "identifier":"5eff37558df4[...]3f01244f6ee80fc73",
  "data":[
    "aesni_intel",
    "af_packet",
    "button",
    ...
  ]
}

Tip

SUSE Multi-Linux Manager sends additional data about the used hypervisor and virtualized systems. Find more details in https://documentation.suse.com/subscription/hypervisor-collector/html/SLE-scc-hypervisor-collector/index.html#scc-hypervisor-collector-data.

The new functionality of SUSEConnect brings the following benefits to the customer: