C.6 Maintaining Environment Configuration Standards

Secure Configuration Manager can notify you or a change management system when an endpoint no longer complies with your technical standards. Automated notifications are useful when the endpoint’s system contains sensitive information or must be continuously operational. Core Services generates the alerts based on results from scheduled policy template runs. You can schedule policy templates to run at regular intervals. You can also configure a delta report to run concurrently with the scheduled policy template so you can quickly discover changes in an endpoint’s configuration.

As a best practice, your scheduled runs of tasks, policy templates, delta reports, and security checks should occur at different times to reduce the load on the database and Core Services. Secure Configuration Manager runs built-in jobs, such as purging old reports, at specific times of the day. By default, Core Services purges the database at 1 a.m., local time. At 3 a.m., Core Services takes snapshots of policy template results to use in the Asset Compliance View trending reports.

Also, when scheduling jobs, keep in mind that Secure Configuration Manager runs those jobs according to the local time on the Core Services computer. For example, a console user in London schedules a job to run at 4 a.m., with the assumption that the job runs according to Greenwich Mean Time. However, the Core Services computer in New York City runs the job at 4 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, which is five hours later than the user planned.