Problem Description

Since upgrading to Coder v2.23.X, the provisioner list (both in CLI and UI) shows a continuously growing list of outdated/offline provisioners.

These provisioners (often or typically) correspond to Kubernetes pods that have been replaced during deployments but remain in the list for up to 7 days before automatic cleanup.

Current behavior:

• Offline provisioners from previous deployments clutter the list
• No way to filter active vs. inactive provisioners
• UI shows confusing "outdated" status without version information
• CLI limited to 50, and cannot sort leaving the end-user possibly missing some in Active state
• Upgrade suggestions appear for permanently offline provisioners with 'may' is reasonable, but the suggestion to upgrade doesn't fully embrace 'to current or matching version'

Proposed Solution

1. Default Filtering

• CLI: Add --show-offline flag to display offline provisioners (make them hidden by default)
• UI: Filter to show only active provisioners by default, with toggle for "Show all provisioners"

2. Enhanced Status Display

• UI: Display actual provisioner versions instead of "outdated" status
• Status clarity: Distinguish between "temporarily offline" vs "permanently replaced" (can relate to k8s resource being present or not)

3. User Experience Improvements

• Documentation: Add clear messaging about automatic cleanup policy (X days/7 days)
• Alerts: Modify upgrade suggestions to only target active provisioners
• Sorting: Allow sorting by status, version, and last seen timestamp
• CLU: Make Active by default show up at the top/beginning of the list (less important if we have --show-offline). Use the 'Created At' time rather than sorting by name (current method).

4. CLI Enhancements

# Default: show only active provisioners
coder provisioner list

# Show all provisioners (current behavior)
coder provisioner list --show-offline

# Filter by status
coder provisioner list --status=idle,running,offline

# Show provisioners from last X days (similar to since, which would be '--last-seen')
coder provisioner list --max-age=24h

5. UI Enhancements

• Filter controls similar to other Coder UI screens
• Version information displayed clearly
• Status indicators that differentiate between:
  • Active (idle/running)
  • Temporarily offline
  • Permanently replaced/outdated
• Information banner: "Showing active provisioners. Inactive provisioners older than X days are automatically removed."

Benefits

Reduced confusion and consistency between CLI and UI.

Most benefits come immediately by considering:

• Default filtering to show only active provisioners

Since the CLI support -c and -l for number, many of these can be generated manually but should be similar to theUI:

• CLI filtering flags

Avoiding the 'upgrade pressure' and ensure the suggestion on Offline instances to be upgraded:

• Documentation improvements

Related Issues

This feature request addresses similar concerns raised in:

• Filtering and pagination needs for provisioner interfaces: Filtering and pagination on provisioner job list #17156

May relate to API work, since API output may benefit from a concerted set of queries as the UI provides.