MSEndpointMgr

Policy refresh intervals for Devices managed by Microsoft Intune

Over the past weeks I’ve seen a lot of chatter around policy refresh intervals on Twitter and in various forums. In most of the cases, the response has been with an URL to a blog post on TechNet where a member has posted a table of policy refresh intervals for different types of platforms. Recently my fellow blogger Gerry Hampson wrote about the same topic, referencing the blog post from TechNet. I myself had not found any official documentation of these policy refresh intervals, up until today when I stumbled upon the following TechNet documentation:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn743712.aspx
On this documentation page from TechNet, that was updated today in fact, we can clearly see that the policy refresh intervals are well documented for various platforms. It also appears that previous mentioned intervals were correct, just not documented to my knowledge. I’ve copied the tables from the documentation page and inserted them below for your convenience:

PlatformCheck-in frequency after initial notification
iOSEvery 6 hours
AndroidEvery 8 hours
Windows PhoneEvery 8 hours
Windows PCs enrolled as devicesEvery 24 hours

In addition to the mentioned policy refresh intervals above, there are also a set of other intervals worth mentioning if the device has recently enrolled into Microsoft Intune:

PlatformFrequency
iOSEvery 15 minutes for 6 hours and then every 6 hours
AndroidEvery 3 minutes for 15 minutes then every 15 minutes for 2 hours, and then every 8 hours
Windows PhoneEvery 5 minutes for 15 minutes then every 15 minutes for 2 hours, and then every 8 hours
Windows PCs enrolled as devicesEvery 3 minutes for 30 minutes, and then every 24 hours

So what happens if an administrator were to deploy an app or a policy to a device, when will the device receive a notification about the new policy or app? Immediately after the deployment has taken place, Intune will attempt to notify the device that it should check-in with the Intune service. This process normally takes less than 5 minutes. But if the device would not check in to get the new policy, Intune will attempt to notify the device 3 more times. In the case that the device does not receive any of those notifications, the device will get the new policy on its next scheduled check-in with the Intune service accordingly to the tables above.
I hope this helps spreading some light on how the policy refresh (check-in) intervals are configured for devices managed by Microsoft Intune.

Nickolaj Andersen

Chief Technical Architect and Enterprise Mobility MVP since 2016. Nickolaj has been in the IT industry for the past 10 years specializing in Enterprise Mobility and Security, Windows devices and deployments including automation. Awarded as PowerShell Hero in 2015 by the community for his script and tools contributions. Creator of ConfigMgr Prerequisites Tool, ConfigMgr OSD FrontEnd, ConfigMgr WebService to name a few. Frequent speaker at conferences such as Microsoft Ignite, NIC Conference and IT/Dev Connections including nordic user groups.

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