When using FIM/ILM/MIIS very common discussion is "How do I automate my run profiles? and How often should I run the run profiles?"
In light of this conversation topic, this wiki is covering these two questions. The goal is to provide centralized information and additional information on automating the run profiles as well as answering the question of how often.
It is important to understand the different run profiles, and what they do. Here are resources that discuss the run profiles. The run profile definitions have not changed from MIIS 2003 to FIM 2010 and/or FIM 2010 R2.
In FIM 2010 R2, announcement of the deprecation of one-step Import/Sync run profile step types was announced. Please see the Run Profiles in FIM 2010 R2 topic linked below for more information. In FIM 2010 R2 these step types are still available, but it's recommended to avoid using them in new solutions to minimize required changes when upgrading to future versions of the Synchronization Service.
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The Synchronization Engine itself does not provide a means of automating or scheduling your runs. The reason for this is that each business or organization that uses the Synchronization Service Engine has it's own business rules as to when to schedule the runs, and which runs to execute. The Synchronization Service Engine does provide a means of creating a script file that you can utilize with Task Scheduler. This topic is very broad across the internet, but I have brought some of it together for us.
This is a very tough question for a person in support to answer, as each business has different solutions, different needs, and different business rules. As a recommendation, it would be good to sit down with your team and discuss what your business needs are as far as updating the information.
We in support have seen people run it as quick as every 10 minutes, and as much as once a day or once a week. It really depends on your business needs.
If you choose to run around the neighborhood of every 10 minutes, the recommendation would be to keep an eye on it, and ensure that you do not have runs overlapping one another. If you do have runs, especially synchronizations, then it would be recommended that you lengthen the time between runs to ensure that you give your runs adequate time to complete successfully.
Here is a good resource that goes into a deeper explanation of when to run the run profile.
Source: MIM 2016 Troubleshooting: Unable to run the Management Agent (Error: 0x8023063d)
Check this Support-Info: (Sync): Run Profile Optimization blog post on the Identity and Access Management Support Team Blog.
"running more than a single synchronization run profile execution at a time is not supported. The supported method is to execute run profiles asynchronously, allowing each run profile to complete before executing another."
In short: do not run synchronization run profiles in parallel and even running import/export in parallel has some risks.
This could be broken down into several areas. For now, we will break it down at a high level.