CI baselines

You can create baselines that record the attributes and relationships of a set of configuration items (CIs) when they are in a desired state.

A CI baseline contains a benchmark reflecting the state of one or more CIs at a point in time. You can create a baseline to record this data for a set of related CIs, or CIs of a certain type, or any grouping that serves your business purposes. Later, you can compare the baseline to the current state of the actual CIs, to identify differences between the benchmark and the current state.

The members of a baseline are authorized CIs, which have the attributes and relationships that you have chosen to manage.

For example, you might have a group of CIs that make up a business service that you offer to customers. Your agreements with these customers specify certain goals for availability, as well as for support of certain levels of applications. You have worked hard to configure these services, and you need a way to ensure that they remain properly set up. You create a baseline that includes all the CIs that make up the service, and you take a benchmark while all the CIs are configured exactly the way you need them to be. You can compare this benchmark to the actual CIs at intervals to verify that they are configured properly. If a problem arises with the service, you can compare the benchmark to the actual CIs to identify and address any deviations from the desired state of each CI. And when you plan a major change to the service, you can take a benchmark before implementing the change, to ensure that if a problem occurs with the change you can recover to the previous configuration.

Over time you might create new versions of your service, adding or replacing CIs. You can create new versions of your baseline each time you update the service. You can update the list of CIs in a new baseline version, or simply take a new benchmark of the same group of CIs. The new versions reflect the state of the member CIs at different times.

CI baselines are not associated with customers. Each member CI is visible only to users authorized to work with the CIs of the customers with which that member CI is associated. The best practice is to create baselines whose members are associated with the same customer or customers. Then a user who can see and work with any of the members can see and work with all of the members.

By default, CIs that are included in a baseline can be moved to a decommissioned state. If you want to prevent CIs that are included in baselines from being decommissioned, set the value of the system property cci.changestatus.decommissionCIsInBaseline to 0.