When the agent detects that its local time has skewed "too far" from its server's time, it logs that in the agent log. There is also a metric that tracks the time difference.

How can we get the user to know more easily that this happened?

There are several ways to do this - but require manual setup:

a) user can create an alert definition/template so an alert is triggered when the time difference is over a certain amount

b) the user can enable event log tracking on the agent and have an alert def to trigger when the log warning is dumped by the agent

We could add the ability to send up a resource error to the server so the server can show the yellow warning icon on the RHQ Agent resource view. The agent should probably not send up too many of these resource errors - maybe only do it every hour or so?