Given the ability to reduce and create new measures that are tailored and adapted to your particular server or environment, now we want to understand how the system is behaving with all the other parameters unchanged (in Latin, ceteris paribus). This is the baseline. And with the baseline, we establish what is normal, or in other words, what the performance is under normal conditions. A baseline is used for comparing what might be or seem abnormal or out of the ordinary. It can also serve as a control group for any future tests (this works well especially when new patches are rolled out an upgrade of a particular environment/server needs to be performed).
A typical corporate baseline would be described as follows over a period of one day (24 hours) in the form of the number of database requests from users or machines:
When all...