Modern IT Operations Management Why a New Approach is Required, and How Boundary Delivers
TABLE OF CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 3 INTRODUCTION: CHANGING NATURE OF IT 3 WHY TRADITIONAL APPROACHES ARE FAILING 4 HOW BOUNDARY ADDRESSES KEY REQUIREMENTS 4 Key Features 5 BENEFITS OF BOUNDARY 6 BOUNDARY: THE FUTURE OF IT OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT 6 2
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY In just the last few years, the way IT services are delivered has changed radically. However, the tools many organizations use to manage IT operations hasn t changed much which poses significant challenges to those tasked with optimizing service levels. This paper looks at the key requirements for managing today s IT environments, and it shows how Boundary solutions deliver on these requirements. INTRODUCTION: CHANGING NATURE OF IT Your business relies on a mix of physical, virtual, and cloud environments for its critical services. Today, these environments pose significant and unprecedented challenges for those tasked with ensuring optimal service levels. Now, instead of monitoring a handful of servers, you have to manage hundreds of instances. In addition to the traditional computing stack, you re tasked with monitoring complex big data clusters like Hadoop, Cassandra, and Mongo DB, which can feature ten or more distinct application services that have to be tracked. Likewise, distributed applications and cloud environments also entail tracking multiple, distributed, and dynamic application services. Today s applications operate in an entirely new paradigm, one with unique architectures, technologies, and demands. Today, applications have to deliver unprecedented levels of: Today s applications operate in an entirely new paradigm, one with unique architectures, technologies, and demands. Responsiveness. End users demand real-time response, whether they re running analytics or shopping online. Optimal service levels need to be preserved; even slight performance degradations can have disastrous consequences. Scalability. Whatever the nature of your application, scalability is a big issue. You can t continue to expand by buying bigger machines, so you have to scale horizontally. Consequently, you combine next-generation database technologies and application services with public cloud infrastructures. Availability. Modern applications also need to be highly available. Weekly downtime associated with scheduled maintenance isn t acceptable. Applications need to be updated on the fly and remain running through the upgrade process. Agility. Businesses are demanding agility and speed within IT. To keep pace, developers are making changes to application code daily or more, and pushing those changes directly into production. The lines between development, QA, and operations continue to blur, and DevOps is the discipline that s emerging. 3
WHY TRADITIONAL APPROACHES ARE FAILING Today, application infrastructures are complex, distributed, and large scale. Further, they re business critical, which means it s essential that you resolve issues rapidly, ensure continuous availability, and proactively plan for growth. To address these demands, effective IT operations management (ITOM) is vital, but traditional platforms fail to deliver the capabilities required in today s environments. For example, with application performance monitoring (APM) tools, you can implement scripting to measure traffic between specific applications. While this works fine when you have a standard set of languages and platforms, and can apply the scripting required, what happens when you don t and can t? What happens when your business starts leveraging NoSQL, Hadoop, Erlang, and other modern platforms and languages? What happens when you start relying on services in virtualized, cloud, and hybrid implementations? How do you quickly and affordably deploy scripts when you re relying on dozens of services and hundreds of instances across a number of internal and externally hosted locations? The days of monolithic languages and deployment approaches are over. Instead, your organization leverages an array of languages and runs services in a mix of physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Traditional tools simply weren t architected for these new realities. Consequently, when issues arise, IT staff struggles to find answers. Today s business demands and the technologies and processes required to support them create the urgent need for a new breed of IT operations management solutions. Today, you need a solution that: Collects data continuously, rather than on an ad hoc, intermittent basis, so you can do effective, data-driven analysis. Delivers complete application views, regardless of which application languages, platforms, or infrastructures you are using. Provides up-to-the-second updates, so your operations team can immediately assess the impact of application or infrastructure changes before they result in issues that affect users. Enables application monitoring without requiring any modifications to application code or introducing any latency. HOW BOUNDARY ADDRESSES KEY REQUIREMENTS Traditional tools simply weren t architected for these new realities. Consequently, when issues arise, IT staff struggles to find answers. Boundary is a modern ITOM platform built for modern IT operations. Boundary is a SaaS solution designed from the ground up to match the scale and speed of today s applications. Massive data sets are collected, processed, and displayed in real time. Plus, it deploys in minutes settings are automated and no hardware or code changes are needed. 4
Key Features Boundary delivers the capabilities you need to do proactive application management and prevent downtime. Boundary can instantly create and update topology maps. This relational understanding of the underlying infrastructure provides context for the events and metrics Boundary captures. With Boundary s intelligent capabilities for anomaly detection, drill-down analysis, and alerting, you can do rapid root cause identification and get the cross-component visibility you need to spot rogue resource utilization and misconfigurations. Following is an overview of the key capabilities Boundary delivers: Centralized ops dashboard. Boundary s trends dashboard provides a single view for complete visibility into complex, distributed applications, and it provides a powerful, intuitive interface for analyzing changes in your application and infrastructure behavior. Comprehensive coverage. Unlike traditional IT operations management solutions, Boundary helps you understand application and infrastructure behavior, regardless of the language or stack you re using. Boundary is a language- and infrastructure-agnostic platform that provides 100% coverage. We accomplish this by using lightweight software agents that monitor all application traffic, all the time, directly from each individual host. One-second data streams. Utilizing real-time application flow data and behavioral analytics, Boundary provides critical context for proactive event management, making it fast and easy to gain operational insights and rapidly resolve problems. The Boundary streaming engine ingests massive data sets at one-second intervals. This per-second data resolution provides the granularity and insights needed to understand and manage even the most complex and distributed systems. Early warning alerts. Boundary delivers the analytics that enable proactive trend analysis and fast anomaly detection. Boundary provides algorithms that can help forecast behavior and generate alerts when appropriate. The solution offers alerting at all levels, including node, application, and group. In addition, you can use Boundary to collect additional metrics, including throughput, round-trip time, and re-transmits. Application topology mapping. Through its automated discovery, dependency analysis, and application traffic collection, Boundary can create and update topology maps in real time. Boundary offers insights that leverage a relational understanding based on application flows between hosts providing critical context for metrics and events. Consolidated events console. Boundary integrates event data, providing a single platform for consolidated operations management. Boundary offers a pre-built library of event connectors for several platforms, as well as APIs for integration with other tools. As a result, event data from Boundary and third-party platforms can be viewed within the context of application topology. 5
BENEFITS OF BOUNDARY If you re running in the cloud or managing modern applications, Boundary will provide the visibility you need to be successful. Boundary is also an optimal fit for your Agile and DevOps initiatives, enabling real-time behavioral understanding before, during, and after deployments. Through it s unique blend of capabilities, Boundary enables your organization to realize the following benefits: Increase availability. Get the timely, contextual, and granular insights you need to proactively manage performance, prevent downtime, and reduce mean time to recovery. Boost agility. By delivering monitoring data at onesecond intervals, Boundary helps your development teams immediately spot unexpected performance implications of updates, helping them support faster rollout of new services and capabilities. Reduce costs. Boundary is a SaaS solution, which means no upfront hardware costs, and no ongoing platform maintenance overhead. Further, the solution offers the automated capabilities that increase staff efficiency and lower total cost of ownership. BOUNDARY: THE FUTURE OF IT OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT KEY CAPABILITIES Ω Single view. Centralized dashboard delivers complete awareness of complex, distributed applications. Ω Proactive analytics. Continuous anomaly detection with consolidated events and intelligent alerting enable efficient, proactive management. Ω Per-second visibility. Real-time streaming engine enables directed diagnostics and immediate problem resolution. Ω 100% SaaS. Non-intrusive SaaS solution deploys in minutes and reduces operations costs. Ω Enriched event consolidation. View events from Boundary and third party tools within the context of application topology. Give Boundary a try, and discover how modern IT operations management can help your team. Sign up for a free trial /signup. 6
ABOUT BOUNDARY Boundary has developed the first central intelligence service for modern IT operations management. The service analyzes and correlates per-second application traffic chatter with inputs from third-party IT management tools, to provide IT operations teams with early warnings on application and cloud failures. Boundary users can now monitor their entire IT environments from a single cloud-based dashboard that is updated every second, improving business agility and reducing management costs. Anointed a Cool Vendor for DevOps by Gartner, Boundary is privately-held and based in San Francisco, California, with venture funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners and Scale Venture Partners. For more information on Boundary visit us on the web at http://www. or on http://www.twitter.com/boundary. Connect with Boundary Connect with Boundary 1550 Bryant St., Suite 400, San Francisco, CA 94103 1550 Bryant St., Suite 400, San Francisco, CA 94103 415.500.2180 800 California Street, Suite 220, Mountain View, CA 94041 service@ 415.500.2180 service@ 2013 Boundary, Inc. All rights reserved. Boundary and the Boundary logo are registered trademarks of Boundary, Inc. All other products or services mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective companies. Information subject to change without notice. 2013 Boundary, Inc. All rights reserved. Boundary and the Boundary logo are registered trademarks of Boundary, Inc. All other products or services mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective companies. Information subject to change without notice.