IT Operations Management in the industry is changing across the spectrum.  As DevOps takes root as a movement, it certainly appears that we are at the thin end of what will become a major disruption in the management market.  Launched just last May, San Francisco-based Boundary is at the forefront of this evolving field.  In an announcement last week, they added even more integration into operations stacks, making this a unique SaaS offering that collects and analyzes data center monitoring information from a variety of data center environments.  Boundary’s Analytics engine consolidates data from a number of “new stack” leaders including AppDynamics, Joyent, New Relic, Opscode, Plexxi, Puppet labs, Splunk, and others and processes this data in real time, delivered in a single dashboard.  Its flexibility and compatibility is a mark of the next-generation data center, one that is rapidly expanding across the enterprise landscape to include numerous public and private cloud constructs, often across a mix of technology bases.  Further it’s the first to do it on a cloud basis – a service that a client can be up and running on in minutes, if not seconds.   

Gary Read, the company’s CEO discussed these topics at length with us.  Throughout the discussion, the importance of modern, next-generation infrastructure and application capabilities was rather clear, and the role of operations management in bringing these technologies into the enterprise couldn’t be any more critical. 

“We’re seeing devops become absolutely necessary, a necessity in order to gain and maintain the advantages from the variety of meaningful next-generation infrastructures that are all around us”

Boundary is clear in asserting that widespread changes are on the way – in the way that people monitor and engage with their environments.

“It’s no longer good enough to wake up and take a snapshot of the environment and gauge your health based off of that, with all these layers in the stack, and entry points, that is just not doable” 

Boundary’s cloud software is designed to allow for detection and resolution of failures in application and infrastructure, before there is a customer impact.  The company receives and processes some 7.5TB of data a day, with every piece processed in less than a second, so the velocity and processing of data is intense.  The customer experience is essentially real-time environment analysis, and all of the code that runs the data collection, processing and delivery is Boundary’s own development, built to their needs and avoiding any post-processing.   The end result is a system that is an incredible benefit to the customer, with no appliances, gateways, storage, or anything to install, once the customer is in, they are up quickly.  With a variety of pre-defined integrations and APIs, the customer can integrate into a variety of environments rapidly throughout their operations.  Boundary has a free to premium model that scales up to large data sets and enhanced support.

All-New Boundary
Boundary has added more than 100 new features to its product in the past three months.  The new Boundary delivers the following capabilities:

Early Warning Alerting — Boundary has focused on finding the previously undetectable problems.  Its algorithms are used to forecast application behavior and provide alerts when anomalies occur at any level (node, app tier, custom group, etc.).

Consolidated Events Console — Alerts surfaced by Boundary are combined with events/alert from most third-party products and appear in context of the application dependencies.  Boundary has created a pre-built library of event adapters and provides open REST APIs and an email interface for any others.  Boundary’s events management service offers capabilities such as de-duplication of events, auto closing of restoral events, simple operations workflow and powerful filtering and searching across all layers.

Centralized Operations Dashboard – A new, graphical dashboard provides a single view of complex applications and infrastructure across an organization’s entire IT environment, including color-coded warning signals, comprehensive event console for active and recent activities and historical performance graphs for comparing application and infrastructure behavior.

Application Topology Mapping — Boundary provides application discovery and dependency mapping with real-time updates and per-second data collection.

Per-second Data Streams — An always-on streaming engine ingests massive volumes of data pertinent to modern IT operations.  Boundary provides analytics required for proactive, immediate problem resolution.  More than metrics, “intelligent analytics” from Boundary include alerts and insights on third-party events.

Boundary’s operations are worldwide with close to 100 paying customers and growing.  Read notes that in the early days, the adopters were web2.0-type companies, but the trend has been picking up steam rapidly in the enterprise customer space.  These enterprise customers are described as those that are looking to be more agile, and are turning to next-generation architecture, cloud technologies, and DevOps.  Still, the barriers to adoption – the inhibition still lingers out there in the nature of business itself.  Traditional dev operations, layered departments in large corporations and so forth can be difficult to shift forward in thoughts around new ways of doing things, processes, tools and capabilities.  These are usually people problems, but there are ways to drive these changes home.  In some places, what is taking place are companies are actually setting up separate teams to set up these next-generation systems, then bringing the rest of the organization and its departments along.   Through it all, Read says that DevOps is evolving and being adopted rapidly, as evidenced by Boundary’s rapid growth, and that clients are getting the word, seeking out the company at every turn.

At SiliconANGLE, we’ve gone on record with a beat on DevOps and its real-world adoption into the enterprise game – it’s a rapidly growing trend that is indeed becoming closer and closer to a standard across the board.  Boundary’s value proposition to business is tremendous, especially when you consider the easy entry, easy deployment and extensive agility.   Just a bit more:

 “There is a massive shift taking place in the IT world from traditional data centers and fixed environments to cloud infrastructure and highly-distributed applications,” said Gary Read, CEO at Boundary.  “Legacy solutions for IT operations management are woefully inadequate for supporting this change.  We are the first company to deliver a fully-integrated cloud service for managing the total performance of a company’s IT infrastructure and applications.  Using vast amounts of data, Boundary can peer deeply into a company’s environment and instantly understand its health in current and historical context, helping IT promote business agility in ways it couldn’t do before.”