A while back, we noticed that the subscriptions in SCOM where becoming disabled for no known reason. In the end, I wrote a Windows service to monitor the subscriptions and re-enable them should they become disabled.

Well, we finally found a reason and solution. This, believe it or not, is by design!! The folks over at Microsoft thought it would be a really funny joke if they set it up so that once a person creates a subscription and then gets removed from the Operations Manager Administrators role, the subscription would become disabled. The logic of course is that why would you want to have your subscription if you are no longer responsible for administration of SCOM? Never mind that an admin might build a large number of subscriptions then leave the group leaving all of them disabled. This would then require someone else in the group to go in and touch every single subscription created by that admin.

Pretty short sighted if you ask me but regardless, to fix the problem just log in as someone who has administration rights in the console and make a small change to the subscription in question and save it. This will transfer ownership of the subscription to you.

Of course, we flush all but the SDK account from the Operations Manager Administrators role each night so the actual fix is to only allow the SDK service account to create and manage subscriptions.

I did update the product knowledge in the alert for disabled subscriptions so it may explain it a little better.