How to confirm RedHat Enterprise Linux version?

I assume that you've run yum upgrade. That will in general update you to the newest minor release.

Your main resources for determining the version are /etc/redhat_release and lsb_release -a

That is the release version of RHEL, or at least the release of RHEL from which the package supplying /etc/redhat-release was installed. A file like that is probably the closest you can come; you could also look at /etc/lsb-release.

It is theoretically possible to have packages installed from a mix of versions (e.g. upgrading part of the system to 5.5 while leaving other parts at 5.4), so if you depend on the versions of specific components you will need to check for those individually.

That's the RHEL release version.

You can see the kernel version by typing uname -r. It'll be 2.6.something.

Avoid /etc/*release* files and run this command instead, it is far more reliable and gives more details:

rpm -qia '*release*'