Cockpit can use Subscription Manager to join the attach the machine to a subscription, if the operating system (such as RHEL) requires this. This functionality is in the Cockpit subscriptions package.

Subscription Manager limits its use to root only. Therefore if a non-root user is logged into Cockpit, Cockpit tries to escalate privileges to root in order to access subscription information or make changes.

To perform similar tasks from the command line, use the subscription-manager tool:

$ sudo subscription-manager status
+-------------------------------------------+
   System Status Details
+-------------------------------------------+
...