Boundary Hosts Network Monitoring Service

Network monitoring is a key technology for those looking to manage critical networks proactively. After all, it is much easier to maintain a network if you know what is happening to the various devices, applications and infrastructure components attached to the network.

However, traditional monitoring tools rely on archaic polling methodologies, where a device or component is queried only every so often. Admittedly, status queries can occur as frequently as every couple of minutes, but that is severely lacking, at least when compared to real-time monitoring.

Enter Boundary Networks, a hosted services vendor that is looking to change how network managers think about monitoring technologies. The company has launched a new monitoring platform that is available as a managed service, and offers the unique perspective of real-time monitoring of complex networks, while adding the element of application-centric analysis.

Boundary Networks CEO Gary Read says “it's time to rethink monitoring and tailor it to the realities of today's cloud/virtual-centric IT shops”. That new thinking means a change to how network elements are monitored – Boundary is choosing to use less of a device-centric approach and focus more on the application side of the equation. That becomes doubly important for those seeking to monitor and manage applications tuned to use distributed architectures, such as Big Data applications.

“Big Data applications are built differently than more traditional static applications," says Read. "The infrastructure is very dynamic, typically built on cloud infrastructures where servers come and go on a regular basis. As a result, problems occur in terms of application degradation on a distributed basis."

With that in mind, Boundary Networks is focusing on four major monitoring opportunities:

•Data Collection (metrics) – collect all the data all the time, instead of sampling

•Advanced Analytics – meaningful analytics to help give customers rapid insights into massive amounts of monitoring metrics•Application Centric View – monitor how all of the tiers of the application interact rather than looking at the performance of individual servers; monitor applications built using components and languages such as Hadoop, Cassandra, Erlang, PHP, Python, Ruby, Riak, CouchDB and others

•Real Time – redefining real-time monitoring – see the impact within seconds of the packets flowing, as opposed to waiting for several minutes; be able to spot 'brown outs' before 'black outs' occur.

Read notes that it's usually not a single root cause that causes performance issues with applications, but rather a combination of different issues that together trigger the degradation. The Boundary system works by collecting data from the multiple components involved in an application deployment. The collected information is pushed through Boundary’s real-time processing engine and queries are automatically run to interpret the data in real time, and then display on a management GUI, which is updated on a second-by-second basis. Simply put, the network data is organized, analyzed and presented in real time via the management console.

The company’s ideology differs significantly from other monitoring products – instead of using a device-centric model like traditional tools, Boundary focuses on understanding the whole distributed environment. It accomplishes that by looking at every packet that traverses the network, and is able to understand the packet’s contents, as well as where it originated and where it will go.

The company is offering a 14-day free trail (which includes 5 meters) to interested parties via their Website (www.boundary.com). Paid subscriptions to the service are also available and are billed based upon 'meter-hours'. A meter-hour is one meter connected for one hour (or part thereof).

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