Retain metadata values and the last useful observation time through failed, empty and unusable refreshes. Apply the existing retry backoff separately instead of making retained identity new guest-agent evidence or a fresh complete-cache hit. Preserve useful partial responses, normal cache hits and OS failure policy, with HTTP polling and recovery controls.
Contract-Neutral: Behavioural correction to existing guest metadata observation timestamps and retry scheduling; no schema, API, route, field, guest command, admission, duration, retention or numeric source-selection contract delta.
Change-source: pulse-maintainer
pulse-triage[bot]
f1e221a0fb