How FPolicy manages policy processing

There might be multiple FPolicy policies assigned to your storage virtual machine (SVM); each with a different priority. To create an appropriate FPolicy configuration on the SVM, it is important to understand how FPolicy manages policy processing.

Each file access request is initially evaluated to determine which policies are monitoring this event. If it is a monitored event, information about the monitored event along with interested policies is passed to FPolicy where it is evaluated. Each policy is evaluated in order of the assigned priority.

You should consider the following recommendations when configuring policies:

• When you want a policy to always be evaluated before other policies, configure that policy with a higher priority.

• If the success of requested file access operation on a monitored event is a prerequisite for a file request that is evaluated against another policy, give the policy that controls the success or failure of the first file operation a higher priority.

  For example, if one policy manages FPolicy file archiving and restore functionality and a second policy manages file access operations on the online file, the policy that manages file restoration must have a higher priority so that the file is restored before the operation managed by the second policy can be allowed.

• If you want all policies that might apply to a file access operation to be evaluated, give synchronous policies a lower priority.

You can reorder policy priorities for existing policies by modifying the policy sequence number. However, to have FPolicy evaluate policies based on the modified priority order, you must disable and reenable the policy with the modified sequence number.