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IT Operations Management for Google Compute Engine based Apps with Boundary
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
The following post was contributed by Gary Read CEO of Boundary, a modern IT operations management platform provider and Google Cloud Platform partner. With the Boundary service, operations teams can get early warnings about potential problems, before the dominoes start to fall, so that they can prevent application outages. Get a
free, full functional version of Boundary
just for Google Compute Engine customers.
Cloud services like
Google Compute Engine
have fundamentally altered the IT landscape and to effectively monitor this landscape, a new approach is required. To understand and manage performance, operations teams need a monitoring service architected for today’s realities:
Rapid rate of change
. With today’s DevOps and Agile approaches, organizations are rolling out applications daily, if not hourly. With shifting workloads and resources, static reports and even hourly updates won’t suffice.
Highly distributed
. As organizations take advantage of cloud services and new technologies like Hadoop, and Cassandra, application environments continue to get more distributed.
It’s with these basic realities in mind, that Boundary developed an entirely new SaaS-based monitoring service. Our platform supports dynamic environments by streaming data from every system,
every second
, and applying real-time analytics to that information. In distributed environments, we analyze the flows between every application and infrastructure component to give a comprehensive view on all the inter-dependencies and how the distributed system is performing as a whole.
Once this data is collected, Boundary applies big data analytics to the task of IT operations management, and delivers insights through graphical views that are visually exciting and easy to understand. In other words, Boundary makes it practical for IT teams to quickly understand and optimize their modern IT environments.
Delivering Optimized Support for Google Compute Engine
We chose software, rather than appliances to collect application flow data, as this enables us to provide deep visibility without access to the network. Streaming per-second views of performance data, deep visibility into latency, and support for cloud environments, makes Boundary uniquely equipped for Google Compute Engine monitoring.
Agile/DevOps support
Increasing responsive to changing technical and business demands, often means using multiple tools to manage environments and service levels. Boundary can combine real-time streaming data with alerts from third-party platforms, including Google Compute Engine partners Opscode and Puppet Labs, to support fast-changing development environments. This means as customers push out new configurations and automations in Chef and Puppet Enterprise, they can instantly see those changes correlated against the performance impact.
The Boundary Architecture
The graphic below provides an overview of Boundary’s architecture. Lightweight meters automatically stream data from Google Compute Engine instances to the Boundary analytics engine. We analyze this streaming “application chatter” in real-time to automatically build application topology maps,
establish a baseline of normal behavior, and generate alerts when there is a deviation from that normal behavior
. Events from third parties like Chef and Puppet are correlated against this streaming data, so the operation team has a consolidated view and can quickly do root cause analysis.
Please
sign up to check out the free, full-function version of Boundary
just for Google Compute Engine users. Take a look and let us know what you think.
- Contributed by Gary Read, CEO, Boundary
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