Boundary announces free service, speedier monitoring for public and private clouds

Boundary, a San Francisco-based startup with a networking monitoring solution, has introduced some new capabilities for developers to track traffic in real-time on cloud-based applications.

In a nutshell, companies are making more regular changes to their applications. Boundary can update developers in seconds, rather than minutes, to prevent problems before they affect quality or service. It is still early days, but the software-as-a-service monitoring startup counts Git Hub, Okta, and Ping Identity among its first 50 customers.

“Most IT management tools were designed in a different era when infrastructure was static,” explained Gary Read, Boundary’s CEO, in an interview with VentureBeat. “It’s no longer acceptable to take a look at your applications every five minutes.” In January, Read joined the startup after leaving Nimsoft, a cloud monitoring company acquired by CA Technologies for a cool $350 million.

Today, large companies are pushing hundreds of updates a day into production, and expect to be able to monitor networks and application traffic flow in real-time, both for public cloud environments like Amazon EC2 and private cloud datacenters.  Read told me that Boundary can monitor every packet that flows to and from every server instance, whether in the cloud, datacenter, or hybrid environments.

Good news for developers: The company is also releasing its free offering, which lets you monitor up to 5 gigabytes of data. This handles an environment of about 25 servers. If you need to upgrade, it’ll cost you. The premium service is how Boundary makes its money.

In addition, the company’s “big data store”, an update announced today, will enable dev-ops to shelve historical data that may prove useful in the future.

Read claims there are no direct competitors, but Boundary operates in the increasingly crowded application networking and monitoring space. Boundary is up against IBM’s cloud monitoring tool, Tivoli, and HP with its suite of OpenView products.

The company was founded in 2011 and has pulled in $19 million in funding to date. The most recent round of $15 million was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Cloud computing image: winui/Shutterstock