> #### Configuration Advisor baselining guidelines

> In order to receive the most meaningful feedback, consider these guidelines when setting up baselining with the Configuration Advisor:

> - Make sure you have set up Fathom to store trend data. If you did not set this option initially, you can set it by choosing Options Configuration Trend database in the management console.
> - It is important that you collect data and trend data on a 1:1 basis; in other words, it is recommended that you trend on every poll. Whether you set the polling interval to five minutes or ten minutes, for example, is not significant for baselining; it is, however, important that you trend the performance data on every poll, regardless of the poll interval.
> - Consider carefully the timeframe for which you request baselining recommendations. For example, if your resource typically sees little or no activity between the hours of 5 PM and 9 AM, you would not want to get a baseline for an entire 24-hour period. If you did, you would be mixing times of high activity with times of low or nonexistent activity, which would skew the baselining results. Instead, it would be sensible to choose a timeframe of 9 AM to 5 PM, for example.
> - Typically, one week of data collection, using the Fathom-provided defaults, provides enough information for the Configuration Advisor to provide meaningful threshold recommendations. Note that if you choose longer time frames, more data will be analyzed; this means that the calculating done by the Configuration Advisor will be more time-consuming than if you had chosen a shorter time frame.
> - Each rule you want to analyze must have at least 32 data samples stored in the FathomTrendDatabase. This sampling provides sufficient data from which the Configuration Advisor can determine a baseline value and subsequently perform a successful analysis of each rule's data.
> - A polled rule must currently be associated with a defined monitoring plan for that resource in order for the Configuration Advisor to provide a recommendation.

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