3. Edge Manager Additional Topics

New Fleet Creation

We’re in the home stretch and our new store is almost ready to open (thanks to you).

In a moment we will ask you to create a new Fleet and wire in a new (and functional) point of sale application into the fleet device template. Before doing so, let’s examine our networking route that will be utilized to access this new POS app.

  1. Expand and select local-cluster

  2. Expand Networking

  3. Select Routes

  4. Click the 'new-pos' route Location hyperlink to open this route-to-app in a new browser tab

The 'application is not available' error message is expected at this time since we have not added the new (more functional) POS app to our device yet
m3 routes 1

Keep the Application Browser Tab open and return to the Routes Browser Tab

  1. Expand and select All Clusters

  2. Expand Edge Management

  3. Select Fleets

  4. Click Create fleet

m3 createfleet

Populate the Create fleet wizard with the following General info values

  1. Name:

    {user}-new-store-fleet

  2. Device selector: (?) (Please do not select Fleet labels by mistake)

    fleet={user}

  3. Click Next

The following screenshots are shown for example purposes only and may not match your User ID. Unless you have been assigned, 'user1', do not use 'user1' vs. your assigned User ID: {user}.
m3 fleetgeneralinfo

Populate the following Device template values

  1. System image: (Note: this is the same '…​pos-prod:1.0.0' image that we used previously)

    image-registry.openshift-image-registry.svc:5000/student-services/rhel9-bootc-edgemanager-pos-prod:1.0.0

  2. Click + Add application

  3. Image:

    quay.io/kenosborn/podman-compose:v2

  4. Application name:

    new-pos-app

  5. Click Next

m3 fleetdevicetemplate

Leave the Updates parameters at their default settings

  1. Click Next

m3 fleetupdates

Review and create

  1. Review settings and click Create fleet

m3 fleetreviewcreate

Now that the we have created our new fleet, let’s go to your recently onboarded device (from Module 2) and change its fleet membership

  1. Expand Edge Management

  2. Select Devices

  3. Change the Devices section search filter from Labels and fleets to Name and alias (You may need to scroll down to the Devices section if there is a list of Devices pending approval present at the top of this window)

  4. Enter the hometown name you chose for your device to filter the device list

  5. Click YourHomeTown-store-{user} device

m3 userdevice 1

  1. Click the X next to pos=prod to remove the current label

m3 userdevice 2

  1. Click Add label

  2. Replace key=value with fleet={user} and press enter

  3. Observe that we are still running the same System image ('…​pos-prod:1.0.0') (a device reboot will not be required since our new fleet uses the same image that our device is already running)

  4. Observe that your device Applications pane is now populated with our containerized application

m3 userdevice 3
It can take a few moments for your newly added Application to report a green Running status. Thank you for your patience.

After your new-pos-app is returning a green Running status

  1. Click Terminal

  2. Check the containers that are now running on the device:

    podman ps -a
    Sample Output
    CONTAINER ID  IMAGE                                    COMMAND               CREATED         STATUS         PORTS                                        NAMES
111b1391a311  localhost/podman-pause:5.2.2-1737721907                        38 minutes ago  Up 37 minutes                                               47a0b459f7c9-service
fd0157f0e2e1  localhost/podman-pause:5.2.2-1737721907                        38 minutes ago  Up 37 minutes  0.0.0.0:30000->8080/tcp                      9ba794295fe8-infra
c0f559b1dad4  quay.io/jswanson/pos-v1-prod:1.0.0       /usr/bin/run-http...  37 minutes ago  Up 37 minutes  0.0.0.0:30000->8080/tcp, 8080/tcp, 8443/tcp  point-of-sale-pos-prod
6ca9d626e4bb  quay.io/kenosborn/edge-megastore-pos:v1  nginx -g daemon o...  6 minutes ago   Up 6 minutes   0.0.0.0:8080->8080/tcp, 80/tcp, 8080/tcp     new-pos-app-173783_edge-megastore-pos_1
The 'edge-megastore-pos:v1' container listed at the bottom is our new point of sale application.

Return to your Application browser tab (if you inadvertently closed this tab, you can get back to this view by selecting local-cluster in the top menu, followed by selecting Networking\Routes via the left-hand nav)

  1. Refresh your browser and note that the new point of sale application is now available!

  2. Click Start

m3 new pos app

Let’s order some (pretend) donuts via the new POS App (because…​why not)?

  1. Select Red Glazed Donut

  2. Increase quantity to 75

  3. Tender a crisp 100 dollar bill by clicking +100.00

  4. Click Submit

m3 new pos app 1

  1. Click Proceed

m3 new pos app 2

  1. Click Cancel

m3 new pos app 3

Your new home town Edge Megastore, Inc. location is now ready to open for business

C o n g r a t u l a t i o n s !

You’ve done a great job at Edge Megastore, Inc.!

If you’d like to call it a day, you are welcome to end the lab here (thank you); however, if you would like to earn some Overtime (mythical) pay and explore a few more advanced topics you are welcome to continue.

Edge Manager Command Line Interface

The Edge Manager CLI contains a robust set of commands. In fact, most (if not all) of what we have explored in this lab via the Edge Manager UI can be done via CLI.

The Edge Manager CLI is currently still named after the upstream project: flightctl and has been pre-loaded for you in our lab environment

  1. Click the OpenShift >_ (Terminal) icon in the upper-right hand corner

  2. Set Project is set to: wksp-{user} (Note: You may need to scroll down to select)

  3. Click Start

The wksp-user in this screenshot may not match your user ID
m3 cli 1

  1. Give yourself some more screen real estate by clicking the Open terminal in new tab icon

m3 cli 2

We are now going to authenticate against the Edge Manager service and issue several CLI commands

  1. Authenticate to the Edge Manager service via CLI

    flightctl login https://api.apps.cluster-my-guid.dynamic.redhatworkshops.io --username {user} --password {password} --insecure-skip-tls-verify
    Sample Output
    Login successful.

  2. Examine the commands available

    flightctl
    Sample Output
    flightctl controls the Flight Control fleet management service.

Usage:
  flightctl [flags] [options]
  flightctl [command]

Available Commands:
  apply            Apply a configuration to a resource by file name or stdin.
  approve          Approve a certificate signing or enrollment request.
  certificate      Request a new certificate for a device with 'certificate request'
  completion       Generate autocompletion script
  console          Connect a console to the remote device through the server.
  csr-generate     Generate a CSR resource config .yaml based on a .csr file and optional additional parameters
  decommission     Decommission a device.
  delete           Delete resources by resources or owner.
  deny             Deny a certificate signing or enrollment request.
  enrollmentconfig Get enrollment config for devices
  get              Display one or many resources.
  help             Help about any command
  login            Login to flight control
  version          Print flightctl version information.

Flags:
  -h, --help   help for flightctl

Use "flightctl [command] --help" for more information about a command.

  3. Examine versioning information

    flightctl version
    Sample Output
    flightctl CLI version: v0.5.1
flightctl service version: v0.5.1

  4. Retrieve a list of devices

    flightctl get devices
    Sample Output (your list may vary)
    NAME                                                    ALIAS                   OWNER                           SYSTEM  UPDATED         APPLICATIONS    LAST SEEN
93og3n5l2n5pv3muj7oh3aut8rhn3ka1cvvhl6qo8nunihr69sng    nc-raleigh-store-01     Fleet/point-of-sale-prod        Online  UpToDate        Healthy         8 seconds ago
9sb2f8o7bko0q27tusl2c2kkegm5o90f44ej4rj0msb0pjh60m00    ca-paloalto-store-01    Fleet/point-of-sale-prod        Online  UpToDate        Healthy         9 seconds ago
h68mfmg1b63ebv278rr1no5egdcvlmjbsbe4ftc8bit6vttognfg    maplegrove-store-user1  Fleet/user1-new-store-fleet     Online  UpToDate        Healthy         9 seconds ago
qgmnbi04co3lc0f3pkko281km71vv4e60vnserde63cb73jhdub0    ca-torrance-store-01    Fleet/point-of-sale-prod        Online  UpToDate        Healthy         8 seconds ago
v4uh4tbravm7fefgiqjm1prra3sfh1dgrn8uh70fjj8i9m13jo30    nc-charlotte-store-01   Fleet/point-of-sale-prod        Online  UpToDate        Healthy         3 seconds ago

We are now going to grep for your specific hometown-store-{user} device

  1. Replace 'maplegrove' with your home town name

    flightctl get device | grep maplegrove
    Sample Output
    NAME                                                    ALIAS                   OWNER                           SYSTEM  UPDATED         APPLICATIONS    LAST SEEN
h68mfmg1b63ebv278rr1no5egdcvlmjbsbe4ftc8bit6vttognfg    maplegrove-store-user1  Fleet/user1-new-store-fleet     Online  UpToDate        Healthy         4 seconds ago

Double-click to select the entire ID (under the Name Column) for your device, right-click and select copy

  1. Set a console variable equal to your device ID (right-click and paste your device UID value)

    mydeviceid=right-click & paste your-device-id

We can retrieve your device template specifications and status by piping output to yaml (or json)

  1. Pipe to yaml and examine the output

    flightctl get device/$mydeviceid -o yaml
    Sample Output (Abridged)
    apiVersion: flightctl.io/v1alpha1
kind: Device
metadata:
  annotations:
    device-controller/renderedVersion: "13"
    fleet-controller/renderedTemplateVersion: "2025-04-14T21:52:26.688988475Z"
    fleet-controller/templateVersion: "2025-04-14T21:52:26.688988475Z"
  creationTimestamp: "2025-04-14T21:14:11.706159Z"
  generation: 3
  labels:
    alias: maplegrove-store-user1
    fleet: user1
  name: h68mfmg1b63ebv278rr1no5egdcvlmjbsbe4ftc8bit6vttognfg
  owner: Fleet/user1-new-store-fleet
  resourceVersion: "1320"
spec:
  applications:
  - envVars: {}
    image: quay.io/kenosborn/podman-compose:v2
    name: new-pos-app
  config: []
  os:
    image: image-registry.openshift-image-registry.svc:5000/student-services/rhel9-bootc-edgemanager-pos-prod:1.0.0
status:
  applications:
  - name: new-pos-app
    ready: 1/1
    restarts: 0
    status: Running
The Edge Manager API is similar to a Kubernetes API in that we can utilize yaml to create/update/remove Edge Manager devices and fleets by using 'flightctl apply -f file.yaml' commands.

For our last CLI example, let’s connect to a console session within your actual hometown-store-{user} device

  1. To initiate a console session, utilize the following command

    flightctl console device/$mydeviceid
    Sample Output
    Connecting to device h68mfmg1b63ebv278rr1no5egdcvlmjbsbe4ftc8bit6vttognfg
Use CTRL+B 3 times to exit console
It can take a few moments for your Terminal session to establish (thank you for your patience)

You can now interact directly with your device via its console!

  1. Examine the containers running on this device (the output should look familiar to you)

    podman ps -a
    Sample Output (your list may vary)
    CONTAINER ID  IMAGE                                    COMMAND               CREATED      STATUS      PORTS                                        NAMES
111b1391a311  localhost/podman-pause:5.2.2-1737721907                        3 hours ago  Up 3 hours                                               47a0b459f7c9-service
fd0157f0e2e1  localhost/podman-pause:5.2.2-1737721907                        3 hours ago  Up 3 hours  0.0.0.0:30000->8080/tcp                      9ba794295fe8-infra
c0f559b1dad4  quay.io/jswanson/pos-v1-prod:1.0.0       /usr/bin/run-http...  3 hours ago  Up 3 hours  0.0.0.0:30000->8080/tcp, 8080/tcp, 8443/tcp  point-of-sale-pos-prod
6ca9d626e4bb  quay.io/kenosborn/edge-megastore-pos:v1  nginx -g daemon o...  2 hours ago  Up 2 hours  0.0.0.0:8080->8080/tcp, 80/tcp, 8080/tcp     new-pos-app-173783_edge-megastore-pos_1

Exit the device remote console session by typing exit or by holding down your CTRL key and pressing the B key three times

Edge Manager Device Monitoring and Decommission

Let’s explore the device monitoring that is available for our new store device

  1. Expand and select All Clusters

  2. Expand Edge Management

  3. Select Devices

  4. Change the Devices section search filter from Labels and fleets to Name and alias (You may need to scroll down to the Devices section if there is a list of Devices pending approval present at the top of this window)

  5. Enter the hometown name you chose for your device to filter the device list

  6. Click YourHomeTown-store-{user} device

m3 userdevice 1

We have previously seen (in the System status pane) how Device status and Update status change depending on our device state (rebooting, online, updating, up-to-date, etc.)

  1. In the System status pane, click the (?) tooltips for each of the status items and review their contents

m3 monitoring 2

Edge Manager also surfaces Application Status in the Device Applications pane.

Let’s non-gracefully kill our new-pos-app container app and examine status

  1. Click Terminal

  2. Copy/Paste this command to kill our new-pos-app container

    podman kill -s 9 new-pos-app-173783_edge-megastore-pos_1
    Sample Output
    new-pos-app-173783_edge-megastore-pos_1

  3. List out the containers and note that the new-pos-app is in an 'Exited' state (via the Status column)

    podman ps -a
    Sample Output
    CONTAINER ID  IMAGE                                    COMMAND               CREATED       STATUS                           PORTS                                        NAMES
111b1391a311  localhost/podman-pause:5.2.2-1737721907                        15 hours ago  Up 15 hours                                                                   47a0b459f7c9-service
fd0157f0e2e1  localhost/podman-pause:5.2.2-1737721907                        15 hours ago  Up 15 hours                      0.0.0.0:30000->8080/tcp                      9ba794295fe8-infra
c0f559b1dad4  quay.io/jswanson/pos-v1-prod:1.0.0       /usr/bin/run-http...  15 hours ago  Up 15 hours                      0.0.0.0:30000->8080/tcp, 8080/tcp, 8443/tcp  point-of-sale-pos-prod
6ca9d626e4bb  quay.io/kenosborn/edge-megastore-pos:v1  nginx -g daemon o...  15 hours ago  Exited (137) About a minute ago  0.0.0.0:8080->8080/tcp, 80/tcp, 8080/tcp     new-pos-app-173783_edge-megastore-pos_1

  4. Click Details and note that Edge Manager is reporting '(!) Error' in both the System status and Applications pane

m3 monitoring 3
This information is also rolled up holistically for all devices at both the Fleet level and overall Edge Manager level

  1. In the device Resource status pane, you can observe that Edge Manager is surfacing device CPU, Disk and Memory pressure status.

m3 monitoring 4
In Edge Manager, users can customize device resource monitors and define alerts when the utilization crosses a defined threshold (for example, 'trigger a warning alert if the average disk utilization exceeds 75% for more than 30 minutes' and 'trigger a critical alert if disk utilization exceeds 90% for over 10 minutes with a sampling interval of 5 seconds.").

Device Decommission

All things must come to an end. For our final lesson, we will bid farewell to our new store device by decommissioning it.

Stop your Edge Device Virtual Machine

  1. Expand and select local-cluster

  2. Expand Virtualization

  3. Select VirtualMachines

  4. Select vertical ellipses

  5. Click stop

m3 decommission 4

Return to your device within Edge Manager

  1. Expand and select All Clusters

  2. Expand Edge Management

  3. Select Devices

  4. Change the Devices section search filter from Labels and fleets to Name and alias (You may need to scroll down to the Devices section if there is a list of Devices pending approval present at the top of this window)

  5. Enter the hometown name you chose for your device to filter the device list

  6. Click YourHomeTown-store-{user} device

Decommission your device

  1. Expand Actions

  2. Select Decommission device

m3 decommission 1

  1. Click Decommission device

m3 decommission 2

  1. Set the Show only decommissioned devices toggle to on ((You may need to scroll down to the Devices section if there is a list of Devices pending approval present at the top of this window)

m3 decommission 3

Here we can observe the list of decommisioned devices (there is no need at this point in our Lab to further delete devices)

Lab Summary

m3 summary

On behalf of the entire Red Hat Edge Manager team, we would like to extend a heartfelt THANK YOU for taking the time to explore this lab today.

We hope your time at Edge Megastore, Inc. has been an enjoyable and informative one.

BTW, judging by that store front image above it looks like our EMI Marketing Department has some more work to do…​ :)

Thank you, again - have a great day!