Big Data startups are rolling and show no signs of slowing down anytime soon.  That’s certainly the case with Boundary, which announced a massive growth of 400% year over year base increase.  The company now analyzes up to 2 trillion metrics per day, and 500 billion of those come from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem.  People everywhere are seeing improvements across the board and understand the need to find problems faster.   It is phenomenal growth that is based on the benefits of ultimate environment visibility.  This trend can be expected to continue as legacy environments and applications will transition into new diverse environments that are in some cases on premise, but also in the range of cloud environments.  By delivering flexibility, information and visibility, Boundary is making this analysis possible in every type of environment imaginable.

Indeed, the stakes are getting higher:

Increased use of Boundary is happening because CIOs are under pressure to provide consistently high uptime for internal and public-facing applications.  That puts IT Operations professionals in the position of having to know how applications and infrastructure are performing at all times, and the impact of change to their environments.  Modern environments are much more complex than their predecessors, raising the degree of difficulty for IT Operations.  So, they send more and more data to Boundary, which ingests, correlates and analyzes performance information on a second-by-second basis, giving IT Operations staff as well as the CIO the confidence they need to expand their use of AWS and similar services.

Collecting and processing data is becoming more and more critical to today’s scalable, flexible environments, especially considering all the points of data, a transforming system of applications and the need for rapid information.  Big Data answers that call with relevant insight, predicting those risk points that could impact some element of services within an environment.  Boundary performs this by a mass-scale collection and analysis, forming a granular baseline of information that is the basis from which anomalous events are gleaned.  The list of capabilities of the product is huge:

•    On-premise and cloud infrastructure network flow metrics offering insight on the communication latency between services indicating risks to applications.  This single source offers organizations the only SaaS solution with per-second resolution and history to help optimize their cloud-based applications.
•       Cloud adoption with confidence by helping organizations move to AWS and similar services with the same visibility they would expect to have for their on-premise applications.
•       Real-time metrics calculated and streamed to customers including bits/second (in/out), packets/second (in/out), round-trip times, out of order packets/second, re-transmits/second, and more.
•       A real-time application topology map showing all the nodes a network traffic routes across an IT infrastructure, updated to accurately reflect the current upstream and downstream impacts.
•       SaaS based means that organizations do not need to spend significant resources on scoping, procuring, deploying and maintaining hardware. As a result, clients have visibility on the first day with little to no risk.

Some quotes round out the types of wins that Boundary is stacking up to its credit:

“Boundary’s real-time network layer topology has allowed us to provide instantaneous operational value for our AWS implementations,” says Allen Shacklock, lead cloud architect at Scripps Networks Interactive, owner of brands such as the Food Network, HGTV and the Travel Channel.  “The benefit of using a SaaS provider to visualize traffic patterns and identify problem areas quickly allows for teams to proactively solve issues without taking on additional management tasks.”

“Managing a system running on AWS that supports 5000 TPS from 20+ million users is not a simple task,” says Charles Chan, head of engineering at Wattpad.  “Boundary makes it easy by giving us insight into what is going on at the AWS network layer in real-time.  Whether it is Nginx, Elasticsearch or Redis, Boundary is able to identify any change in traffic pattern going in or come out of any particular node.  If there is anything happening to our system, we are able to isolate the node that is causing the issue almost instantaneously, which means we are able to avoid issues before the majority of our users see them.”

“Boundary has become our go-to instrument for seeing into the clouds,” says Matt Mankins, CTO at Fast Company.  “Boundary helps us sleep soundly.  In the middle of a winter snowstorm, we got reports from our monitoring service that our site wasn’t responding.  Was it the weather?  Was it Amazon EC2?  Boundary helped us disambiguate and create a narrative from its charts to answer, ‘What’s going on?’ (An intermediate network had a connectivity issue. We can sleep!).  I’ve used Boundary graphs to explain our cloud-based app on more than one occasion. It’s a great way to illustrate how our technology stack interacts – both now and historically. People of all technical levels can use the Boundary interface to help tell a story about ‘what’s going on.’”

“We’re 100 percent in the cloud, so we had no way of monitoring the physical network,” says Adam D’Amico, director of technical operations at Okta.  “Previously, we could see very coarse statistics, but now we have an aggregated view and we can see fine-grained aspects of how the network is functioning.  With Boundary, we can now identify specific application service traffic volumes, such as MySQL traffic and overall AWS health, so we can proactively size our cloud instances and handle peak demand.”

“We’ve completely disrupted the legacy IT Operations software model,” says Gary Read, CEO and president at Boundary.  “To start, we’ve removed the need and cost of scoping, procuring, deploying and managing hardware that would typically consume countless hours and other valuable resources.  We’re giving free trials to customers and they’re typically seeing millions of metrics and optimizing their applications in the first week.  Most of the time spent fixing an application or infrastructure problem is focused on finding the source, and that’s exactly where Boundary helps customers.”

Boundary was mentioned at the 2013 Splunk conference on theCUBE and throughout SiliconANGLE coverage:

Information and quotes from Boundary press release