Smart Thresholds Using Baselines

Baselining is a process by which Traverse can automatically set the warning and critical thresholds for each test based on the test's historical data. This allows one to set customized thresholds automatically based on each tests's individual behavior.

As an example, the response time for a local device is normally much smaller than the response time for a device in a remote datacenter because of network latency. Rather than setting the response time warning threshold for all devices to be the same, you can use the baseline feature to calculate the 95th percentile of the response time reported for each device over a three-month period, and then set the warning threshold to be 10% higher than this 95th percentile value.

Once a baseline threshold value is set for a test, the threshold value is static. If you wish to re-calibrate the baseline threshold, you need to rerun it.

Baseline Data Set

The baseline value is calculated for each test based on its own historical data. You select the devices and tests for which you want to run baselining by specifying a combination of device name, test name and test type.

Each time Traverse aggregates a test result, it stores three values: The minimum, maximum, and mean values of the tested variable over the course of the aggregation period. For example, if Traverse is configured to store data for 1 day at 10 minute samples, and a test is set up to run every 10 minutes, in the course of a day it generates 144 test results. Each test result includes the maximum, minimum, and mean values of the tested quantity for the 10 minute period. You can generate a baseline from the maximum, minimum, or mean samples within the specified date range.

Traverse can calculate a single baseline value based on the historical data which can then be used to generate a static warning and critical threshold for a test. In addition to static thresholds, Traverse can also calculate the baseline per day of week and per hour of day (e.g. 8am on Thu) and use these dynamic baselines to create time based thresholds.

Creating a Baseline and Setting Thresholds for One or More Tests

1. Select the Administration tab.
2. On the Manage Devices page, click Test Baseline Management.
   • If you instead access the Test Baseline Management page from either the Manage Tests page or the Update Test page, some of the Baseline Management information is filled in.
3. Specify the device names and test names you want to baseline. In both fields you can use a regular expression containing `*' wildcards to match multiple device names.
4. Select the test types and subtypes you want to baseline.
5. Enter the date range of the test results to be used in calculating the baseline. Each selected test must have test results available for the full date range.
6. In the Taking values of field, specify whether you want the baseline to be calculated from the maximum, minimum, or mean values of the test results
7. Near the And using the field, select a method for calculating the baseline from the selected results.
8. Correlate the Warning Threshold and Critical Thresholds to the baseline. For each threshold, enter a percentage above or below the baseline, and then click Submit.
9. The system calculates the baselines. This step might take some time depending on the amount of data to be processed.
10. Once the baselines are calculated, the Test Baseline Management window is displayed. The window lists each test that matches your search criteria along with the current thresholds in the Old Warn/Crit column and the new values that have been calculated from the baseline in the New Warn/Crit column. At this point, thresholds have not yet changed. Select those tests whose thresholds you want to change, and then click Done.