Seven Ways “As a Service” Can Benefit You
Once an issue is discovered, it usually doesn’t take the average IT organization very long to resolve that particular problem. What can take forever, though, is actually discovering the real source of the problem.
Given all the interdependencies that exist between the components of an IT ecosystem, the root cause of particular issue is usually not immediately apparent. To help IT organizations discover the true source of an IT problem, Boundary has updated its IT operations monitoring software that is available as a service in the cloud.
Scott Fingerhut, vice president of marketing for Boundary, says the upgrades to the monitoring software not only help reduce the number of IT outages, but also can shorten the mean time to discovery of a core issue by identifying “patient zero” as the actual source of a problem.
To both extend the reach of those capabilities and reduce the amount of time it takes to deploy them, Boundary has added support for Fedora 14, OS-X and openSUSE systems to the Windows platforms and cloud service platforms such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace, that Boundary already supports.
With this latest version, Boundary has upgraded the user interface, added customized dashboards and plans to add features that will make it easier for IT staff to collaborate.
Boundary has also reduced the amount of time it takes to install the meters it deploys to collect data about the environment. It has also given IT control over which data gets prioritized during that collection process.
Fingerhut says that in an effort to narrow the divide between IT operations teams and applications management, Boundary has added support for a wide variety of application programming interfaces (APIs) that collect data via everything from Web application monitoring tools to various distributions of Hadoop. The end goal, says Fingerhut, is to be able to allow IT organizations to identify issues associated with a particular end-user experience.
With enterprise IT becoming more complex, the days when IT organizations could rely on legacy IT management tools is coming to a close. Whether the next generation of IT management tools gets deployed in the cloud or on premise may ultimately be a matter of personal taste. But the level of sophistication of those tools needs to be orders of magnitude greater than the management tools of the past.
