Handle Fleet Desktop /api/_version_/fleet/device/{token}... API Premium Endpoints

[lucasmrod]

What

Some Fleet Desktop features are only available for premiums installs:

• Expose policies on My device page #5445
• Notify end user when device is failing one or more policies via the menu icon #5579

Goal

This issue has two sides:

• Fleet Server: Make sure to return license errors when requesting premium data on non-premium deployments on /api/_version_/fleet/device/{token}... API endpoints.
• Fleet Desktop: Have the Fleet Desktop application support parsing those errors (and retry) accordingly.

[lukeheath]

@lucasmrod If we add the license object to the /fleet/device/{token} endpoint, do we need error responses? There won't be any additional requests needed (for now), we just need to know if the license is free or premium to determine if we should show the red dot icon in the system tray.

  "license": {
    "tier": "premium",
    "organization": "fleet-loadtest",
    "device_count": 999999,
    "expiration": "2025-06-30T19:00:00-05:00",
    "note": "Fleet internal use only"
  },

[lukeheath]

@lucasmrod I'm suggesting we re-spec this ticket to be simply "add license object to /fleet/device/{token} response". Unless I'm missing something (which is certainly possible!) that should give us what we need for this release.

[lucasmrod]

Correct. Not a blocker for this release.

But for next release we want to change the API we use for "polling for policies every X minutes" in the tray application. And such new Fleet API should fail if the deployment is not premium (and the tray app should handle such failure).

Does that make sense?

[lukeheath]

Got it. I'll leave this ticket out for now and spec a new one for the immediate fix.

Question: If fleet desktop sees the user is on a free license, could we just not make the requests? Seems like it might be simpler to implement than error parsing.

[noahtalerman]

@lucasmrod I added the list of Fleet Desktop features that are only available for premiums installs to the issue description.

[lucasmrod]

Question: If fleet desktop sees the user is on a free license, could we just not make the requests? Seems like it might be simpler to implement than error parsing.

Agree. First version could just do this.

• I was thinking on error handling in case deployments that go from free to premium, then Fleet Desktop would eventually show the premium features.
• And Fleet Server should return the license errors on non-premium deployments so that non-premium users cannot use the /device/API to retrieve such premium data.

[roperzh]

When #5967 gets merged, we will have two device endpoints with premium data:

a. GET /api/_version_/fleet/device/{token} (because it contains a policies array)
b. GET /api/_version_/fleet/device/{token}/policies

I will modify a to only include policy information for premium users, this way the UI can remain untouched (at least as far as I can tell by looking at the code)