cDot Admin Force Reassociate to mimic mechanizer Force Associate

Proposal

Improve the cDot Admin 'Force Reassociate' tool to match the functionality of the deprecated Mechanizer 'Force Associate' tool by allowing it to overwrite existing subscriptions without requiring manual clearing.

Problem Statement

The ask for support to apply a subscription to a namespace only happens when there has been some other problem occur that has stopped the self service or automatic association process from working.

In these situations where support is required to replace a subscription on a customer namespace with a new purchase, the new cDot Admin Force Reassociate tool is not as useful as the old Mechanizer task was. This came up recently when support was required to replace a $0 subscription with the purchased subscription. (Ticket ref: 627540

The cDot Admin tool requires us to manually run the Clear Subscription task, before we can use the Force Reassociate tool. This adds a manual process and with that a greater risk of an error affecting the customer.

Current vs Previous Behavior

Current cDot Admin Force Reassociate:

  1. Manually run "Clear subscription" on the namespace
  2. Apply new subscription using Force Reassociate
  3. Risk of customer being left on free plan if process fails between steps

Previous Mechanizer Force Associate:

  • Single operation that would overwrite any existing subscription on the namespace.
  • If there was a problem applying the new subscription to the namespace, the namespace would continue on the existing subscription without impacting the customer.

Proposed Solution

Enhance the cDot Admin 'Force Reassociate' tool to mimic the Mechanizer Force Associate functionality:

  • Allow Force Reassociate to overwrite existing subscriptions without requiring manual clearing
  • Maintain existing subscription if new subscription application fails
  • Single-step process for subscription replacement.

Benefits

  • Reduced manual steps and operational risk
  • Lower chance of customer impact from failed processes
  • Simplified workflow for support engineers
  • Maintains customer on existing subscription if replacement fails