When rules evaluate
Rules evaluate on a configured cadence, after a periodic People Integration sync completes.
Default cadence
The default cadence is once daily, starting at midnight UTC. On the default cadence, every enabled rule evaluates once per day.
Configuring the cadence
The cadence is controlled by the People Integration sync interval setting under System Settings. Available options are every 3 hours, every 6 hours, every 12 hours, or every 24 hours. The setting is restricted to super-admins. The schedule anchors at midnight UTC — for example, the every-6-hours cadence runs at 00:00, 06:00, 12:00, and 18:00 UTC.
Each scheduled sync completes its People Integration data refresh, then triggers rule evaluation immediately after.
What does and does not trigger evaluation
Periodic People Integration sync (scheduled) — runs rules.
Manual People Integration sync from the PI Syncs dashboard — does not run rules. The confirmation dialog explicitly notes this before the admin proceeds.
Manual trigger from the Automated Rules dashboard (per rule) — runs that one rule.
To re-run rules outside the scheduled cadence, use the per-rule manual trigger on the Automated Rules dashboard.
How rules run
Rules execute sequentially in the order shown on the Automated Rules dashboard, top to bottom. Each rule completes before the next begins.
Rule order
Order is controlled by dragging on the Automated Rules dashboard. Order matters when one rule depends on the output of another — for example, a rule that adds people to a New engineers group should run before a rule whose segment filters on that group's membership.
New rules are added to the bottom of the list by default. Reorder them immediately if order matters for your setup.
Disabled rules are skipped
Rules with the Enable toggle off are skipped during evaluation. They remain in their dashboard position but are not processed. Disabling a rule does not undo changes the rule previously applied — group memberships, content assignments, badges, and so on remain in place. To remove those, take the action manually or with a different rule.
Editing and deleting rules
Edits take effect on the next run
Changes to a rule's name, description, segment, or action take effect at the next scheduled evaluation. Editing a rule does not trigger an immediate re-run. To apply edits immediately, use the manual trigger on the Automated Rules dashboard after saving.
Edits are forward-only
Editing a rule does not separately re-process people who matched the previous condition. The rule runs forward with its updated configuration; previously-acted-on people are not unwound by the edit itself.
This interacts with the reconciliation model below: sync actions always reconcile against the current segment on every run, so changes to the segment effectively flow through. Apply-once actions do not retroactively remove prior assignments, badges, or mentorship program memberships.
Deleting a rule
Deleting a rule removes it from the dashboard. Prior changes the rule applied remain in place.
How rules reconcile prior state
Different action types handle prior state differently. There are two patterns: sync actions and apply-once actions.
Sync actions
Assign to a group and Assign to group(s) by template are sync actions. On every run, the rule reconciles group membership against the current segment:
People who match the segment and are not already in the group are added.
People who are in the group but no longer match the segment are removed.
This means automated group memberships can be trusted to stay accurate without intervention. It also means manual additions to a group governed by an automated rule are removed on the next run if the manually-added person does not match the segment. If you need a group with both rule-driven and manually-managed memberships, use a separate group for the manual additions.
Apply-once actions
The remaining actions apply changes once and then skip people who are already in the desired state.
For Assign a content item, the rule checks for an existing assignment to the content:
Outstanding (not started, in progress) — no re-assignment.
Dropped — no re-assignment.
Complete — no re-assignment.
Exempted — no re-assignment.
Expired — re-assigned.
The expired-assignment behavior allows rules to drive recertification: when an assignment reaches its expiration date, the next rule run re-assigns the content. To configure expiration, see How to set expiration dates for content.
For Add/remove badges from users and Add/remove users to a mentorship program, the rule checks current state and acts only on people not already in the desired state. See the action cookbooks for specifics.
For the event enrollment actions, dedup behavior depends on the specific action. See How to automate event enrollments and How to automate scheduled track enrollments.
Manual triggers
The Automated Rules dashboard exposes a per-rule manual trigger. Use it when:
A rule was just edited and you want it to run before the next scheduled cycle.
A new rule was just published and you want it to start applying without waiting.
You want to verify a rule's behavior during setup.
The manual trigger runs only that one rule, not the entire dashboard. Rule order is irrelevant to a single manual run.