Boundary has announced some major upgrades to its IT operations monitoring software.  They’ve made major improvements to the user experience, customized event dashboards and integrated faster deployments of Boundary meters.  Also, the meter coverage and capabilities have been extended to better handle denial of service attacks, and they are now supporting three new operating systems: Fedora 14, OS-X and openSUSE.

Boundary on a roll

Boundary has been on a nice roll of late; recall their momentum news from January.  Boundary also just hired a former CTO at CA to run its product group.  Their product updates come around just about this often, and this one is packed with a bunch of new features like a new UI and contextual navigation – both designed to streamline operations and get customers the information they need to quickly identify and resolve performance problems.

Based on customer feedback, user experience analysis and streamlined workflow research, Boundary has developed a new UI that vastly reduces the time needed to identify and resolve performance problems. A redesigned vertical navigation bar improves screen space utilization and contextual filters help users quickly navigate from problem notification (event view) to impact analysis (topology view) to detailed diagnostics (streams view) in a matter of seconds — a 75% efficiency improvement from the previous version of Boundary and a massive advantage compared to the time similar activities take using legacy on-premise tools.

Customized Event Dashboards

Boundary now lets end-users easily create customized event dashboards that provide a “single pane of glass” showing which systems are generating the most events. For example, you can see how many events are coming from New Relic, Chef, Nagios and other monitoring tools in one view.  Event dashboards can include detailed information such as how many AWS events are being generated by specific AWS API calls.

Faster Deployments

Boundary has significantly accelerated deployments of meters. By eliminating the need for user input on initial installation, companies can more easily use automated change management tools such as Chef and Puppet to deploy and manage the Boundary meter on Windows machines. Boundary also introduced the capability to deploy the same meter using install parameters referencing appropriate tags as well as the ability to install the meter in multiple locations at once such as Test, Staging and Production. These enhancements reduce IT deployment time while adding increased automation. Finally, on servers with many thousands of simultaneous connections running on Linux systems, the meter now starts many times faster on heavily loaded servers.

Resiliency Support

Boundary has improved local filtering which prioritizes application traffic in the meter. For example, if a meter cannot connect to the Boundary service the customer now has the option of storing the flows locally at the client and then streaming them once connectivity is back. This is especially useful when guarantees and SLA’s are relevant.

Decreased Memory Usage and Improved Buffering

Boundary has improved free memory cache efficiency, resulting in memory now being yielded to the OS more aggressively resulting in a 50% reduction in average memory usage. Improved IPFIX data buffering prevents a large build-up of data to be transmitted, reducing memory utilization in high-traffic scenarios. This also improves the meter’s handling of Denial of Service (DoS) scenarios by 60% as Boundary has reduced the meter’s memory utilization to avoid contributing to the traffic load and risk of server crashes.

As reported last month, Boundary is seeing tremendous growth in a wide variety of use environments that are marked by dynamic characteristics like no other time in the computer industry.  From massive cloud-based services, applications, hybrid networks and fluid environments of all types, Boundary’s powerful platform, features and flexibility are a natural for enterprises that place priorities on mission-critical systems and applications.  Boundary continues to process more and more data to these ends and the refinement of user interface, memory improvements, and rapid deployment enhancements on this comprehensive platform make for a compelling solution for modern data environments.

“This is our most significant product announcement to date, and is in direct response to the complex needs of our customers who are hosting applications across the cloud and on-premise. They need to maintain high reliability and uptime while keeping infrastructure costs as low as possible,” says Gary Read, CEO of Boundary. “They also need their applications and services to perform amid security threats and network unpredictability. The latest version of Boundary is well-equipped to help IT organizations to more easily navigate these issues and help them find problems faster than ever before.”

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