Baselines are one of those CM concepts that sounds like bureaucratic overhead until you need one. The question "what was the approved configuration six months ago" is easy to answer with baselines and nearly impossible without them.

In CMDB-Kit, baselines come in three types from EIA-649C:

• Functional Baseline (FBL): the approved requirements
• Allocated Baseline (ABL): the approved allocation of requirements to components
• Product Baseline (PBL): the approved build that shipped

But not every team needs all three. A SaaS team doing continuous deployment might only need PBL to track what shipped. A defense program under formal CM discipline needs all three for audit compliance.

When did baselines become necessary for your program? What triggered it?