(imported topic written by Meldor91)
Hi everyone,
I’ve looked through all the documentation that I could find and I still don’t understand what baselines do. Can someone enlighten me here?
(imported comment written by NoahSalzman)
To oversimplify: Baselines are a way to group Fixlets together.
The classic example is “I want all 3 of these patches to be grouped together and I want to apply all 3 patches in one action. I also want to see “success” only if all 3 patches are successful.” So, you create a baseline that contains all 3 patches and apply the baseline to a number of computers.
From the “Evaluation Guide”:
Baselines Tab
Baselines are collections of Fixlet messages and Tasks. They provide a powerful way to deploy a
group of Actions across an entire network with a single command.
Baselines allow you to maintain a common operating environment, for example making sure that a
specific group of computers has the same software, patches, and configuration changes. Baselines are
easy to set up. Just select the Fixlet messages, Tasks and other Baselines that you want to be a part of
the baseline. To limit the scope of a Baseline, a Relevance expression can be used to target any subset
of your network, using IP addresses, computer names, operating systems and many other qualifiers.
For example, you might make a Baseline named “January critical hotfixes,” and populate it with all of
that month’s critical hotfixes, available from the Fixlet list. Or you might create a Baseline named
“Finance department baseline,” designed to keep that particular group of computers updated with the
latest financial programs, financial tables, updates. and patches.
To create a Baseline, click the Baselines tab and choose Create New Baseline from the right-click
context menu. You will need to provide a name for your Baseline and create the list of components.