Baseline View overview
What is a Baseline View ? Copied
A Baseline View is a statistical model of your IT infrastructure that uses the information contained in the performance data, server inventory and storage data you upload. It is an overall statistical view of your data, presented in a hierarchy.
The hierarchical overview of your IT infrastructure is shown in a sunburst visualization. This sunburst consists of segments which are sized and coloured to reflect the underlying infrastructure data.
Each Baseline View may also be time-bound over a specific date range within the available data.
Each Baseline View is made up of the following underlying data:
- Configuration settings — groupings, zoom level, and displayed metrics.
- Date range — the range of dates over the uploaded data that is displayed.
- Headroom reference — a specified reference workload, or a derived average workload, for use in headroom calculations.
A Baseline View is fully interactive. You can change the way your data is displayed by adding and removing segments, hiding data from the chart or simply viewing individual properties of each segment. In addition, you can use the Baseline View editor to prepare for Forward Thinking by creating custom visualisations of your estate.
What is a sunburst? Copied
The sunburst is the central part of the screen where your Baseline View or Forward Thinking scenario is visualised.
Graphically, the sunburst is divided into the following elements:
- Rings — represent groupings and can be rearranged.
- Segments — rings are divided into segments, each segment represents a grouping value.
- Centre circle — a segment of its own, with details that can be viewed just like any other segment.
- Small circles around the sunburst — represent your workloads.
Colours of the elements on the sunburst carry particular meaning . For more information, see Sunburst Colours.
Hierarchical display Copied
Each new ring drawn from the centre of the chart is a child of the one that comes before it. This creates a hierarchy between the rings. The sunburst, in many ways, is almost like a circular pivot table, allowing you to bring in multiple dimensions to slice and dice data. It is also hierarchical, with the centre zone being the root of the hierarchy and then radiating outwards through various levels. It lets you quickly see how your IT infrastructure is distributed between, for example, datacentres (on the inside ring) and hosts (on the outside ring).
For more information about rings and segments, see Sunburst interface.
Date ranges in Baseline View Copied
By default, a Baseline View shows the most recent 12 weeks of uploaded data. However, each Baseline View can be defined with either an upper or lower date boundary, or both, to limit the data shown in the View.
For example, if there was a significant infrastructure change on a certain date in the past, you can exclude the irrelevant data prior to that date by setting a lower date boundary on the Baseline View.
Regardless of what date range is defined on a Baseline View, by default a maximum of 84 days of data can be shown in any one view.
If an upper date boundary is not specified in a Baseline View, the date range behaves as a sliding window as new data is added to the project to always show the most recent 12 weeks of data.
In any project, a default view with no date boundaries is always available at any time after data has been added to your project. Use this as a starting point to look at your uploaded data and familiarise yourself with what is available in the Baseline View.
You can create a completely new Baseline View with your required date range at any time, or alternatively start from an existing Baseline View and save a new view using a subset of the displayed date range. For more information, see Create a baseline view .
Interface Copied
The interface of Baseline Thinking and Capacity Planner is very similar. Most of the visible elements are the same, but the interactions with these elements may be different. For more information, see Application interface.