This article was published on August 14, 2012

App monitoring tool Boundary launches a free tier as it partners up with Engine Yard


App monitoring tool Boundary launches a free tier as it partners up with Engine Yard

Today Boundary announced a free tier of usage for its product, and also made a new partnership with Engine Yard known.

Boundary’s product is real-time application monitoring, including applications in the cloud, allowing companies and developers to ensure that their train stays on the rails. Essentially, Boundary collects oodles of data from your application as it operates, and then displays the information in an actionable format. This helps with both the finding of problems, and their heading off – if you can see a problem start to build, you can work to resolve it before the whole damn application goes south.

The product works with public and private clouds, as well as traditional datacenters. The idea behind Boundary is that it can take in every piece of performance data, and present it in such a way that decisions can be made on the fly. Just for fun, here’s a screenshot of Boundary at work:

Previously, Boundary was a paid-only product. However, a new free tier will open the product to a new class of customer. The company likely intends to use the free-layer of its service as a marketing tool to attract new customers. Paid plans for the company’s product start at $199. Free users are limited to 2 gigabytes of data daily, but do not have access to the same data storage as non-free users.

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Also announced today is a partnership between Boundary and Engine Yard. Engine Yard is a Platform as a Service that supports applications coded in Ruby or PHP. Crosspollinating the two products is logical: Engine Yard is a cloud host and Boundary tracks cloud apps. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the language used to describe it indicates that a revenue-sharing agreement is likely.

Boundary is technologically interesting for a number of reasons, perhaps chief among which is how it manages real-time data ingress and storage. The sheer amount of data that can be generated by modern applications is stunning. Other firms are working with the tracking data of a similar structure, such as TempoDB, which works with time-series information. Put another way, how to manage huge numbers of data points tied to time in a way that is indexable and searchable quickly is exceptionally difficult.

As it matures, Boundary has the potential to shake up how applications are managed. Currently, it can detect certain events in apps, and flag them. In time, what Boundary could do as it better learns to pull truth from a stream of information is open for imagination.

The cloud matters more than ever, just as application uptime is as critical as always. That means that if Boundary can save companies meaningful time, it shouldn’t have too hard a time converting its new free users to paying customers.

➤ Boundary

Top Image Credit: Robert Scoble

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