PBM On Schedule Mode

Let’s take a look out how to schedule policy evalution using the PBM On Schedule mode.  Start by double clicking on the policy of your choice.  Next we need to change the evaluation mode to On Schedule.  As soon as you make this change you will notice a red warning appear at the top of the dialog stating that you must assign a schedule.  You can either pick an existing schedule using the Pick button or create a new one with the New button.  Let’s click the new button and create a new schedule called “Every Day 2AM”.  Here is what the schedule should look like.

Back in the policy dialog you need to check off the Enable box and click OK to close the dialog.

If you go look at your SQL Server Agent jobs you will notice a new job with the prefix “syspolicy_check_schedule” followed by a unique identifier.  The first thing you should do is rename it, so you know what it does in the future.  Let’s run this job to test out our new policy.  The job will report success even if a policy violation occurs because the violation will be stored in PBM.  If you right click the policy and select history we can see the results.

We can see that the most recent evaluation had a policy violation and we can see the results in the details pane.  Our ReportServer database has violated the policy and that’s easy to see in the details pane, but we only evaluated one policy against a handful of databases.  You’ll notice that the detail information is stored in XML format and could be time consuming to navigate if the job had a broader scope.  To get a better view of the result we can click the hyperlink in the details column to get a graphical view.