Using Data-Driven Web Services › How to Create a Custom Metric Family › Create a Custom Metric Family XML File › Add the <BaselineList> Section

Add the <BaselineList> Section

When analyzing your environment, knowing when an item is operating outside of a normal range is valuable information. To help you determine what is "normal," Data Aggregator can calculate baseline values The statistical analysis data set includes minimum, maximum, mean (average), standard deviation, and other metrics that are recalculated hourly to include the most recently collected data. This data helps to characterize past performance for selected monitored parameters, and helps to assess present performance and estimate future performance. For example, comparing current CPU utilization to a known baseline average level helps to determine whether current utilization is within a typical range. A monitored parameter that exceeds a baseline can indicate additional load on the server from a new application process, an increase in the number of users or sessions, or an increase in the amount of data being processed..

Note: For more information about baselines in reports, see the Data Aggregator Administrator Guide.

For a custom metric family, you can instruct Data Aggregator to calculate baseline information for an attribute. The <BaselineList> section in your custom metric family indicates how to calculate the baseline information for a given attribute.

Important! You must define a baseline calculation in this section for each attribute in the <AttributeList> section with a <Baseline_> tag set to True.

In this section, your options for setting up baseline calculations are as follows:

Name

Specifies the baseline definition name.

ID

Specifies a unique identifier for the baseline definition. The value must be unique within the set of all baseline definitions for this metric family.

PerformanceMetric

Specifies the name of the metric for which the baseline is calculated. Specify Name in AttributeList; that attribute must have its Polled property set to True.

StartDate

Deprecated. If it is present, set it to 0.

EndDate

Deprecated. If it is present, set it to 0.

DaysOfWeek

Deprecated. If it is present, set it to 0.

Period

Specifies to calculate either hourly or daily baseline.

Window

Deprecated. If it is present, set it to 30 days.

Note: For more information about each XML tag, see the inline documentation provided in the MetricFamily.xsd and Component.xsd files. For code examples, see the ProcessInfoMFWithComponent.xml file. This example file defines a metric family for gathering process metrics.

The following illustration provides an example of using BaselineList elements:

More information:

Create a Custom Metric Family XML File