Whenever technology platforms change, there is a scramble to provide the underlying services upon which the new paradigm sits. The move to the cloud is no different and cloud monitoring is one area where there is a significant amount of activity in terms of startups being founded and funded. Today it’s the turn of Boundary, a startup created by veterans of both Amazon and Microsoft. Boundary pitches itself as a “real time network monitoring as a service and that description was sufficient to land $4.1M in series A funding from Lightspeed.

Boundary pitches its offering as one that offers DevOps teams continuous visibility into their network and application traffic flows in public cloud environments. That’s cool but not overly different from other monitoring services out there. Boundary is differentiating its service by offering SaaS-based pricing, super easy setup and highly granular measurements with a to-the-second and by-the-second monitoring interval.

Essentially they’re hoping that DevOps will see the value in highly fine-grained monitoring and that the services those DevOps maintain face some critical issues that require by-the-second monitoring.

True to the buzzword de jour, Boundary is excited that it is a “Big Data collection, streaming, and real-time analytics system”, what that actually means beyond the exciting buzzwords is essentially that it can collect, monitor and analyze a truck load of data in real-time. But of course the term “big data” added at least a million dollars to their funding round.

Boundary is offering full API-based access to its platform to allow for interesting customizations and integrations – that’s a pretty interesting area and I’d suspect we’ll see some smart third party offerings off the back of the Boundary APIs. Already Boundary has integrated with configuration management offerings from Chef and Puppet.

Monitoring is an interesting space – it’s a feature rather than a product so I expect to see an immense amount of churn (through M&A and failure activity) over the coming year or two – Boundary is yet another player to watch.

Source: http://www.diversity.net.nz/boundary-latest-to-pick-up-cloud-monitoring-funding/2011/11/15/