Azure Console warns "virtual machine agent status is not ready"

[marmijo]

A warning message appears in the Azure Portal when creating an FCOS VM that says

"<VM NAME> virtual machine agent status is not ready. Troubleshoot the issue ->".

An internal RH ticket (https://issues.redhat.com/browse/OCPBUGS-9947) was filed to avoid having this warning prompt on the azure console:

"We should try to figure out whether there's a good way to get rid of this warning; maybe we can convince MSFT to honor a metadata attribute that says it's explicitly known that this image does not contain their agent?"

I followed the instructions from the generic steps for starting an azure vm without the linux agent document. Posting the "Ready" state to the wireserver does not resolve the issue and we also already perform this check-in step in Afterburn, so all VMs should be getting this "ready" health status anyway.

The status set via this method is separate from the "Agent Status" seen in the Azure portal GUI. It seems to be that the agent has either a "Ready" status if it's been installed on the VM (and working properly), or a "Not Ready" status in all other cases. And since we don't use the agent, we are getting a "Not Ready" status in the portal. There is a flag to create a VM without the agent --enable-agent false but it doesn't make a difference with the status seen in the portal GUI.

I found this post on Microsoft Q&A that mentions that there is no way to remove this advisory without having the agent installed: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/978782/agentless-custom-linux-vm-images

The advisory appears to be cosemetic and has no impact on the operation of the VM since we use Afterburn to perform the tasks that the agent would perform otherwise. However, the warning could be lead users to think there is an issue with the virtual machine. It would be great if Microsoft were to honor the --enable-agent flag for agent status in the portal. If a user starts a VM with the flag set to false then show e.g. "Not Installed" or similar with no advisory message.