If a fleet owner has a customer that unsubscribes to their service, that fleet owner would like to suspend that device in order to stop paying balenaCloud device charges. With the ability to easily unsuspend if their customer later changes their mind. This is a lot like deleting a device, with the ability to later undelete.
For example: As a fleet owner, I have customers that will unsubscribe from my service. I would like to suspend such a device. With the ability to easily later unsuspend that device if my customer resubscribes. I don’t want to pay a monthly device fee while I am not receiving revenue for that device. I understand that I cannot act upon a suspended device, nor will balenaCloud display any information about that device. This is a lot like deleting a device, with the ability to later undelete.
I have a similar need. I would be OK with paying the fee to deactivate a device, but I from my understanding, the customer could just turn the device back on and it would reactivate. If you could just make it so that devices can only be reactivated manually that would work for me at least.
Chris Crocker-White: @Matt in the case of the suspend feature, the device powering on or trying to reconnect to balenaCloud would not cause it to be ‘unsuspended’ in the same way that it does when a device is deactivated. They are clearly two different use cases and we would like to support both.
The reason for deactivate rather than delete is to allow a record of it use to exist. When edge computer fails it is replaced with an edge that has a new serial number (name). We need queries for its old S/N to still provide info about it. We used the notes section to detail unexpected circumstances, like failed computer.
For our normal operation we build the edge computer and provision them and place them into inventory. Previously we were paying for them at that point even though they remain in inventory for a year or more before being commissioned. This is a cost savings idea to not pay for them while in storage. For this case, having them automatically re-enable when connected by customer and commissioned is a good thing. It would be nice to have an email notification that this event occurred.
Because of this workflow of auto re-enable, if we disable it and accidentally it gets reconnected before going to inventory, we will not know this and continue to pay for it. That is what a manual re-enablement would allow us to prevent.
Just a note on this idea/feature request. If I suspend a customer’s device then I would like to have the option to disable it completely where it’s unusable (until they resume the service), OR just disable future application updates and VPN access. In my use case the customer will still be allowed to continue to use the device with the application version that was installed before the device was suspended, just not getting any updates nor VPN access.