Subscription manager must always explain license changes on the local system

Solution Unverified - Updated -

Issue

These days, we saw this:

  • RHEL guest in a VM on VMware hypervisor, with subscription manager and properly connected/having a subscription
  • subscription manager dropped the subscription 'out of the blue', telling in logs "I'm dropping it", but not the reason

The request: Subscription manager must always explain the reason of subscription changes

example scenario 1

  • we have a hypervisor without virt-who running
  • a virtualized guest runs RHEL and subscription manager is asked to register
  • if only a temporary license is granted at that point, subscription manager needs in clear words to tell the user so, and the reason why this is just a temporary license (i.e. "I do not know details of the hypervisor because I am not running virt-who")

example 2

When a subscription expires then subscription manager needs to explain which subscription expired and which new subscription it associates with the system.

The state as of today:

  • As we experienced in a past case, subscription manager was dropping an existing subscription without providing the reasoning of it's actions. We saw 'subscription was dropped' and basically could only guess that subscription manager had assumed the guest moved to a different hyper- visor (which the customer thinks did not happen).
  • Apparently higher loglevel would provide that, but
    • implementing that now, after the event, will not provide us with the details at that time
    • It is likely to provide to much output, making it harder to read and requiring the customer to consider storage requirements for the logs or logrotation.

The request: subscription manager must by default log on which base it does it's actions.

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), all versions
  • subscription manager

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