Boundary has released major new capabilities that will significantly help any organization running modern IT infrastructures to improve the performance and availability of their applications.

The first of the new capabilities enables Boundary to collect, process and provide insights into over 80 new metrics representing the performance of the server instances and the infrastructure and to do so on a second-by-second basis. This is in addition to its unique capability to collect the application flow data in real-time showing the health of the application.

Boundary has cracked the code on being able to continuously collect an enormous amount of performance metrics with very low overhead and to process them all “in-stream,” giving insights that are virtually real-time. This is critical for modern environments where DevOps needs to understand the outliers and anomalies that coarsely sampled data just cannot see.

Boundary is also delivering a brand new anomaly detection capability that will allow customers to be auto-alerted to outliers for any metric by using minimum, maximum, average or sum at many different intervals from one second all the way to 12 hours.

Boundary also changes the speed and effectiveness of how teams work together to solve problems by delivering an embedded collaboration capability. Inspired by activity feeds popularized by Twitter and Facebook, Boundary lets users collaborate to resolve issues by exchanging messages inside Boundary, adding comments and knowledge to issues, and tracking each other’s activity. Messages can be posted globally within the customer or can be associated directly with a specific IT event.

Boundary also makes it easy to track messages that involve specific users. With the collaboration view, they can mention other users with the familiar @username syntax popularized by Twitter. When a user is mentioned in a message they will be automatically notified both from within the Boundary user interface and externally via email in case they are not logged in.

Boundary also enables easy sharing of information during the troubleshooting process, by allowing users to quickly share links in the collaboration view. For example, a user may link to a run-book article that describes ways to resolve a specific issue. All messages and their links are archived for future reference and searching.
The right info to the right people at the right time in the right way

Boundary also includes a multi-channel notification capability integrated directly with its event management and monitoring. Boundary enables users to specify notification rules based a variety of criteria enabling different notifications to happen for different issues together with escalation paths when problems are not resolved. Teams are defined so that notifications are sent to different groups ensuring everyone relevant is copied on the issue. Once notified, the team can work on solving the problem together by using the collaboration capabilities, irrespective of where they are located.

Users also have the ability to customize how they want to be notified, whether by email, SMS and/or voice calls and messages can be automatically escalated based on user-defined rules. For example, an IT operator may want to be notified first by email and then by a voice call two minutes later if they don’t acknowledge the email. This assures each person can choose the types of notifications that work best for him or her and reduces the likelihood of an important message being missed or lost.

Upon receiving a notification, users can acknowledge or close the event using any of the available communication protocols including SMS or voice. Acknowledging events is as simple as clicking a link or replying to a SMS message. Every acknowledgement is automatically updated in the Boundary event console.

In addition, Boundary’s event management capability, which has been proven to scale to millions of events, now contains additional generic adapter options that include Syslog, SNMP and email adapters.

Boundary provides customers with free access to its adapters and the library continues to grow as new contributions are made.