Splunk® Glossary: Baseline

Understanding What Normal Looks Like

Security and operations teams face a fundamental challenge: how do you recognize when something is wrong if you don’t know what “right” looks like?

In Splunk, a baseline answers that question. It’s simply a record of normal behavior—a pattern of typical activity that helps teams identify when something deviates from the expected.

Think about how you notice changes in your own life. You know roughly how much you spend on groceries each month. You recognize when traffic on your commute is heavier than usual. You can tell when your computer is running slower than normal. That’s baseline thinking.

How baselines work in practice

Imagine a company’s network usually sees 1,000 login attempts per hour during business hours. That’s the baseline. Security teams track this pattern over days, weeks, and months to understand what typical activity looks like.

Then one Tuesday morning, the system suddenly registers 5,000 login attempts in ten minutes. Because there’s a baseline showing that 1,000 per hour is normal, the system immediately flags this spike as unusual. It could be a legitimate event—maybe a new training program launched and hundreds of employees are logging in simultaneously. Or it could signal a brute-force attack attempting to guess passwords.

Without that baseline, you wouldn’t know if 5,000 attempts is concerning or routine.

What gets baselined

Organizations establish baselines for nearly every measurable activity:

Data transfer volumes: How much data employees typically download or upload
Application usage: Which programs get accessed most frequently and when
System performance: Normal CPU usage, memory consumption, response times
Network traffic: Typical bandwidth usage during different times of day
Error rates: Expected frequency of failed transactions or system errors
User behavior: Standard login times, typical file access patterns

Once these patterns are documented, spotting anomalies becomes much more straightforward.

Why this matters for security and operations

Baselines transform overwhelming data into actionable intelligence. Instead of reviewing millions of individual events, teams focus on deviations from normal patterns.

For example:

An employee who typically accesses 10 files per day suddenly downloads 10,000 files
A server that normally uses 40% CPU capacity suddenly jumps to 95%
Network traffic that usually peaks at 2 PM suddenly spikes at 3 AM

Each of these deviations from baseline triggers investigation. Sometimes there’s a legitimate explanation. Other times, it’s the first sign of a security breach or system failure.

The human element

Here’s what makes baseline monitoring particularly valuable as a career skill: it requires judgment, not just technical knowledge.

You need to ask questions like:

Is this deviation significant enough to investigate?
What could explain this change in normal behavior?
Is this a one-time anomaly or the start of a trend?
Which baselines matter most during different times (holidays, month-end closing, product launches)?

These are analytical thinking skills that apply across many roles. If you’ve ever tracked sales performance, managed schedules, or monitored quality control, you’ve already practiced this kind of pattern recognition.

How Ableversity helps you develop these skills

At Ableversity, our Splunk training teaches you how to establish baselines, configure alerts when systems deviate from normal patterns, and determine which changes require immediate attention.

The training is designed to be accessible even for beginners. You’ll learn by doing, working with real scenarios that demonstrate how baseline monitoring protects organizations and enables better decision-making.

If you want to explore these skills further, you can learn more at ableversity.com/blogs?utm_source=wordpress&utm_medium=Ableversity&utm_campaign=publer

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