Surface failures when installing custom packages and Fleet-maintained apps

[noahtalerman]

• @noahtalerman: We're adding improvements to surface failures when installing App Store apps in this user story (Surface failures when installing App Store apps #25514). This separate request is about surfacing failures when installing custom packages and/or Fleet-maintained apps in these scenarios:
  • If the IT admin hits the Fleet API to install software on a host that's outside of the software's target, they see an error, but this attempted install doesn't show up in the activity feed.
  • A specific software was set to automatic install but the IT admin already queued an install/uninstall for this software via the UI/API
  • If the IT admin hits the Fleet API to install macOS software on a Windows host, they see an error, but this attempted install doesn't show up in the activity feed.

[noahtalerman]

• @noahtalerman: We're adding improvements to surface failures when installing App Store apps in this user story (Surface failures when installing App Store apps #25514). This separate request is about surfacing failures when installing custom packages and/or Fleet-maintained apps in these scenarios:
  • After an install, for a specific software, was added to upcoming activities (queued), the IT admin changes the software's scope
    • @noahtalerman: We cancel all pending install/uninstall requests if the scope changes so we never hit this error, right?
  • A specific software was set to automatically install but the IT admin already queued an install/uninstall for this software
  • The specific software is incompatible with the host's platform
    • @noahtalerman: For what platforms specifically do we not surface an error for today?

@iansltx do you know the answer to my questions above? (issue description) Also please feel free to edit the issue description if parts are wrong.

[iansltx]

@noahtalerman

• After an install, for a specific software, was added to upcoming activities (queued), the IT admin changes the software's scope

  • @noahtalerman: We cancel all pending install/uninstall requests if the scope changes so we never hit this error, right?

This is for when someone calls the API to install an app that is out of scope, following the convention on VPP of "if we error out add an activity."

• A specific software was set to automatically install but the IT admin already queued an install/uninstall for this software

• The specific software is incompatible with the host's platform

  • @noahtalerman: For what platforms specifically do we not surface an error for today?

Same situation as the above. We return an error from the API if e.g. attempting to install a macOS app on a Windows machine.

Both of the above cases are currently silently discarded on when evaluating a policy automation, but would return a 4xx response if attempted via an API call.

We may not want to ad to our audit log for either of these cases, as I believe in both cases we aren't expecting to log if someone makes the same API calls on a VPP app, but I want to make sure we're clear on why some types of host software install API call failures hit the activity log and others don't.