Boundary raises $22M to watch all your apps and infrastructure

These days, companies use lots of tools to ship code and deploy applications. Keeping track of everything can mean keeping a ton of browser tabs open and struggling to identify the biggest issues of the moment.

Boundary has been chipping away at this challenge for the past few years with cloud-based software that brings together alerts from many sources. And today it’s announcing $22 million in new venture funding, which will give it the time and resources to make its product better and more widely used.

The news comes as other companies that monitor applications add substantially to their capabilities. AppDynamics, a company known for watching the performance of applications for developers, is looking more toward enabling business analytics and automation. And AppDynamics competitor New Relic just came out with a tool to answer lots of questions for business analysts.

Boundary already stands out from those by accepting alerts from lots of monitoring systems for applications, the underlying infrastructure, and devops tools like Puppet and Chef. It also notes the severity of each alert, so admins know when something is a big deal.

Now Boundary is looking to bolster its feature set, chief executive Gary Read told VentureBeat.

New features will let multiple administrators discuss and solve problems together in Boundary, Read said.

And it’s possible that as Boundary gains more customers, it could analyze anonymized data and show aggregated trends across many companies’ IT configurations.

“For us, it’s not just about looking at their usage,” Read said. “We will be, you know, doing more and more of that over time, but it’s also, you know, starting to understand the data and starting to understand the patterns in the data across multiple customer environments.”

As much as it’s seeking to diversify, Boundary also wants to focus on signing up more enterprises and service providers. Service providers are especially important, because they can resell Boundary’s software to their own users, Read said.

A larger customer base will help Boundary compete with IT operations management products from vendors like BMC, IBM, and Zenoss.

Boundary aims to stand out by focusing on modern environments, sometimes with applications running on one or more public clouds. In those settings, it’s critical to have live information about the performance of applications and the infrastructure they depend on. And Boundary can provide such information.

Adams Street Partners led the new round in Boundary. Lightspeed Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, and Triangle Peak Partners also participated.

Boundary started in 2011. To date the San Francisco-based company has raised $41 million, and it has accumulated around 120 customers with case studies on its website from Business Insider, Gilt, Jive Communications, and Okta.