Boundary helps CIOs sleep better with cloud analytics features

IDG News Service - Boundary has added analytics features to its cloud monitoring service to give enterprises a better idea of how applications running on public clouds are performing and warn them when something starts to go wrong.

Boundary is delivered as software-as-a-service and the new analytics features are being added this week, according to CEO Gary Read.

"The features will allow enterprises to start understanding what is normal for their cloud-based applications, including performance characteristics such as latency, response times and traffic patterns," Read said.

When that has been established, Boundary can start to warn users when things start to go wrong.

Measurements are done minute by minute, and it takes at least a week for Boundary to get to know an environment and provide any meaningful analysis, according to Read.

"This will alert customers to issues that they otherwise, in many cases, would not have known about," Read said.

While being tested, Boundary unearthed unusual traffic patterns in certain applications, Read said. Such traffic patterns can indicate that an application has not been efficiently deployed on a cloud, resulting in increased costs and response times for users, according to Read.

The analytics features will work on any environment, according to Read. In addition to Amazon's cloud, they can be used with Rackspace, SoftLayer, Microsoft Azure as well as platform-as-a-service environments such as Engine Yard, Read said.

Boundary also works with monitoring capabilities offered by the cloud vendors themselves, including Amazon's CloudWatch.

The cost of the service is based on the amount of daily traffic. There is a free version that includes 2GB of data per day, and 5GB of data per day costs US$395 per month.

To give those amounts some perspective, most application servers will produce about 100MB to 150MB of traffic per day, according to the Boundary website.

Boundary now also allows users to store detailed performance data for longer periods, and offers a new reporting component that will automatically compare historical and current performance metrics and email summaries to users.

Improving the platform's reporting capabilities will be a key focus going forward, according to Read.

"What we want to give customers is reports not only on their own performance, but also allow users to see how their applications are performing compared to others in an anonymized way," Read said.

The upgrades were announced in conjunction with Amazon Web Service's re:Invent conference, which takes place this week in Las Vegas.

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