What is a baseline?

What is a baseline?  Dictionary.com defines it as a “specific value or values that can serve as a comparison or control”.  When discussing enterprise management goals, the baseline is the starting point.  Most folks considering enterprise management software want to address a problem.  A typical issue that I hear is “the network is slow” or “application is slow”.  However, when I ask, “what is the desired response time” or “what a good day is”, most folks have no idea where the performance needs to go.  They only know it needs to be better, faster, and end user complaints.  So just as when on purchases a used car or decides to go on a diet, we need a starting point (the number of miles on the car, current weight).  The baseline, just as the definition indicates, provides the comparison/control for the enterprise management solution.  Typical baselines include CPU utilization, response time measurements, number of users, available storage, and memory utilization.  With these starting points, we then deploy a monitoring solution to measure our performance against the controls.  Establishing baselines is the starting point for most enterprise system management deployments.