Problem Statement

Satellite only provides super basic "pending", "failed", or "completed" states, with no way for us to implement custom states/messages or similar. This makes it difficult to debug provisioning failures, as the only recourse we have is to manually watch the kickstart attempt in full via an idrac console or similar.

User Experience & Workflow

We are requesting some way within a kickstart to give better introspection into the build process/state.

Requirements

This could be something as deep as Satellite being aware of the various states that anaconda is in (e.g. the installer is started, verifying kickstart, package installation, post-install, etc...) or, and this is probably more feasible for implementation, a Satellite API endpoint that allows us to specify exact states with a first-class snippet provided as part of the Satellite packaging.

For the second possibility, an example would be calling `snippet("satellite_build_state", :variables => {"state": "Installing - Package Installation Started"})`

Where `satellite_build_state` is a builtin snippet that hits the (newly developed) API endpoint that changes to host's status to the specified message.

Business Impact

Customer may look into other options for building systems in their fleet. Satellite subscriptions may be at risk.