Boundary Announces Largest Release Ever, First to Deliver Unified Monitoring for Web Scale IT

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA–(Marketwired – May 8, 2014) – Boundary has released major new capabilities that will significantly help any organization running modern IT infrastructures to improve the performance and availability of their applications. With Boundary, organizations find problems that are simply invisible to other solutions, hidden in averages and one-minute sampling. Boundary’s new release adds a wealth of server performance metrics to the solution, all delivered with one second resolution, giving unprecedented and instant visibility into how the infrastructure is affecting the application. Boundary is the only solution that brings together application health, infrastructure performance and events/configuration changes, all in context of real-time application topology and all in real-time. In addition, Boundary has released rich and flexible multi-channel notification capabilities, a new and powerful integrated collaboration function, and extended support for other event sources including SNMP, Syslog and email.

“Organizations are investing heavily to establish competitive advantages by deploying next-generation applications, infrastructure and processes, also known as Web-Scale IT, that may include technologies such as cloud, NoSQL databases, API-driven SOAs and processes such as Agile Development, DevOps, and Continuous Integration/Deployment. But they are discovering that legacy IT monitoring solutions are blind to the problems that arise rapidly and unexpectedly in these dynamic, highly distributed environments. Because of this, they are simply unaware of the warning signs that lead to outages and they often find out about issues from their customers,” said Boundary CEO Gary Read. “With today’s announcement, we have effectively made all previous monitoring tools redundant. They will soon be consigned to the history books of technology. Legacy IT monitoring tools are the slide rules to the Boundary digital calculator, totally defunct and obsolete. With users demanding highly responsive applications, attempting to depend on prehistoric once-a-minute or worse sampling periods for monitoring will cost you money, customers and probably your job.”

As written by Gartner analysts Jonah Kowall and Cameron Haight in the December 6, 2013, Building a Modern APM Architecture for the World of Web-Scale IT, “The data collected by many conventional monitoring solutions lacks the granularity and contextual enrichment needed to improve Web-scale decision making.”

“There is an acute and large market need for monitoring solutions like Boundary that deliver high frequency metrics across application health and infrastructure and events, and do so with full application context and topology,” said Bernd Harzog, Analyst, Performance and Capacity Management – The Virtualization Practice. “Customers who are building modern applications just won’t succeed in delivering high levels of performance and availability with the outdated monitoring tools and frameworks of the past.”

All the metrics all the time
The first of the new capabilities enables Boundary to collect, process and provide insights into over 80 new metrics representing the performance of the server instances and the infrastructure and to do so on a second-by-second basis. This is in addition to its unique capability to collect the application flow data in real-time showing the health of the application. Boundary has cracked the code on being able to continuously collect an enormous amount of performance metrics with very low overhead and to process them all “in-stream,” giving insights that are virtually real-time. This is critical for modern environments where DevOps needs to understand the outliers and anomalies that coarsely sampled data just cannot see. Boundary is also delivering a brand new anomaly detection capability that will allow customers to be auto-alerted to outliers for any metric by using minimum, maximum, average or sum at many different intervals from one second all the way to 12 hours.

Social collaboration meets IT Operations
Boundary also changes the speed and effectiveness of how teams work together to solve problems by delivering an embedded collaboration capability. Inspired by activity feeds popularized by Twitter and Facebook, Boundary lets users collaborate to resolve issues by exchanging messages inside Boundary, adding comments and knowledge to issues, and tracking each other’s activity. Messages can be posted globally within the customer or can be associated directly with a specific IT event.

Boundary also makes it easy to track messages that involve specific users. With the collaboration view, they can mention other users with the familiar @username syntax popularized by Twitter. When a user is mentioned in a message they will be automatically notified both from within the Boundary user interface and externally via email in case they are not logged in.

Boundary also enables easy sharing of information during the troubleshooting process, by allowing users to quickly share links in the collaboration view. For example, a user may link to a run-book article that describes ways to resolve a specific issue. All messages and their links are archived for future reference and searching.

The right info to the right people at the right time in the right way
Boundary also includes a robust multi-channel notification capability integrated directly with its event management and monitoring. Boundary enables users to specify notification rules based a variety of criteria enabling different notifications to happen for different issues together with escalation paths when problems are not resolved. Teams are defined so that notifications are sent to different groups ensuring everyone relevant is copied on the issue. Once notified, the team can work on solving the problem together by using the collaboration capabilities, irrespective of where they are located. 

Users also have the ability to customize how they want to be notified, whether by email, SMS and/or voice calls and messages can be automatically escalated based on user-defined rules. For example, an IT operator may want to be notified first by email and then by a voice call two minutes later if they don’t acknowledge the email. This assures each person can choose the types of notifications that work best for him or her and reduces the likelihood of an important message being missed or lost.

Upon receiving a notification, users can acknowledge or close the event using any of the available communication protocols including SMS or voice. Acknowledging events is as simple as clicking a link or replying to a SMS message. Every acknowledgement is automatically updated in the Boundary event console.

“We are very excited about Boundary’s new notification and collaboration capabilities,” said Doug Miller, president and CEO at The Brightworks Group. “We just can’t keep using old processes and tools in a new agile and changing environment. We need to be able to find, diagnose and solve problems in context, with relevant and real-time data at our fingertips. Boundary takes us from end-to-end with easy and modern collaboration.”

Extended visibility for event management
A cornerstone of Operations is being able to correctly integrate, normalize, prioritize, correlate and provide visibility of the multitude of events that occur across different systems. Boundary’s event management capability, which has been proven to scale to millions of events, now contains additional generic adapter options that include Syslog, SNMP and email adapters. Boundary provides customers with free access to its adapters and the library continues to grow as new contributions are made.

About Boundary
Boundary provides a Unified Monitoring solution for Web-Scale IT that allows customers to monitor their entire application infrastructure from a single solution and improve application availability and performance. It is designed to deal with the challenges stemming from modern highly distributed, cloud based applications by combining high frequency performance metrics collection and analysis with its unique understanding of the real-time application topology. Boundary is privately held, based in Mountain View, CA and backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Adams Street Partners and Triangle Peak Partners. For more information on Boundary visit us on the web at www.boundary.com or on www.twitter.com/boundary.