Policies are event triggers that monitor the activity of the system. Policies respond to predefined events issued by changes in the status or performance of specific Automation Orchestrator objects.

Policies are a series of rules, gauges, thresholds, and event filters that run certain workflows or scripts when specific predefined events occur in Automation Orchestrator or in the technologies that Automation Orchestrator accesses through plug-ins. Automation Orchestrator constantly evaluates the policy rules while the policy is running. For instance, you can implement policy gauges and thresholds that monitor the behavior of vCenter objects of the VC:HostSystem and VCirtualMachine types.