Boundary, developer of real-time network monitoring-as-a-service, today announced a $4 million Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Boundary offers DevOps teams continuous visibility into their network and application traffic flows in public cloud environments like Amazon EC2 or private cloud data centers.

Boundary was co-founded by CEO Benjamin Black who brings a wealth of large-scale technology infrastructure operations experience from Amazon where he was responsible for design and implementation efforts for networking, security, and engineering of Amazon's website and Amazon EC2. Co-founder Cliff Moon was previously with Powerset (acquired by Microsoft) where he was instrumental in the design, implementation, launch, and operation of many of the company's production services, which became the foundation for the Bing search engine.

"We've developed a platform that allows organizations to visualize, explore and troubleshoot today's most dynamic networks," said Ben Black, Boundary CEO and co-founder. "Our goal is to offer a simple, yet massively scalable, solution that gives ops teams instant access to their network data as a service. We're excited to bring our offering to market and optimistic about our growth potential going forward."

DevOps teams today lack the continuous infrastructure visibility required to support continuous deployment and rapid recovery. Even modern monitoring and analysis tools cannot keep pace with the rate and volume of change required by today's public and private clouds. Up and running in minutes, Boundary's SaaS-based offering is the industry's first real-time monitoring service that requires no hardware probes. It offers unmatched one-second granularity measurements processing millions of metrics per second.

"The rise of cloud computing has posed an entirely new set of challenges to IT in terms of monitoring and analyzing performance across mixed public and private networks," said Jim Frey, Managing Research Director at EMA. "DevOps teams need highly scalable options that can be tied directly to application deployments and can move dynamically with virtualized workloads. Boundary is taking direct aim at overcoming what is perhaps the greatest barrier facing cloud performance assurance, by eliminating the visibility gaps created when applications are deployed into public, private, or hybrid cloud settings."

The Boundary platform was built for DevOps engineers by DevOps engineers. It is a Big Data collection, streaming, and real-time analytics system for processing high-dimensionality sensor network data at high speed and high volume. Full API-based access into the Boundary platform allows DevOps team to access streaming data and analytics for easy integration and customization with Jenkins, Chef, and Puppet and other existing DevOps and agile processes.

Boundary enables operations teams to immediately detect server-to-server and instance-to-instance issues by pinpointing bottlenecks across application and service flows. For example, in Amazon EC2 environments Boundary's server-instance resident meters uncover hidden problems and unexpected application behavior patterns that can occur between server instances, availability zones, or regions. Traditional monitoring probes and tools cannot be deployed in the cloud and miss transient spikes due to averaging that hides the true traffic dynamics. Boundary's one-second granularity measurements allow users to instantly isolate the source of the problem and start recovery procedures on the spot.

"Boundary extends the benefits of cloud computing to DevOps teams and allows them to monitor their networks in a far more efficient manner," said John Vrionis, Managing Director at Lightspeed Venture Partners. "There's an extremely disruptive opportunity present here, and we believe Boundary is poised to revolutionize the way network monitoring is carried out in IT."