# What does baselining mean, and how long does it take?

Baselining means learning what normal looks like for each device: whom it talks to, on which ports, how much data and at what times, so that a deviation stands out. It takes as long as your business takes to show its normal rhythm: daily patterns appear within days, weekly ones within weeks, and monthly jobs such as payroll or reporting only after a month or more. During that time, expect more alerts and confirm what is normal; your decisions speed it up. A baseline is never finished, because networks change: new servers, new software, new suppliers. NetSenX raises alerts on clear patterns from the start and improves its comparisons with each host's own history as it learns your network.

FAQ: [Small business monitoring](https://netsenx.com/en/faq/smb) · https://netsenx.com/en/faq/what-does-baselining-mean-and-how-long-does-it-take

## Read next

- https://netsenx.com/en/ndr-for-small-business
- https://netsenx.com/en/pricing

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