Compliance rules are created that can be used to help detect violations of compliance policies imposed on an IT infrastructure. Each of one or more compliance rules associated with a respective IT-infrastructure compliance policy is defined by specifying three items: 1) the type of configuration items to which the rule is to be applied, 2) the rule scope that determines which configuration items of the configuration type are to be checked for compliance, and 3) a desired state that each configuration item checked must satisfy in order to be considered in compliance.