PagerDuty provides IT alerting and incident tracking software. In this era of cloud computing, sites need to be fully functional at all times. Issues can arise at any time of the day or night, leaving IT teams scrambling to respond to the problem.

A number of companies provide monitoring tools, such as Nagios, Zenoss, Pingdom, monit, Munin, Splunk, and BasicState, which send out notifications when something is going wrong. Many of these services focus on just one part of IT infrastructure.  As a result, companies have to cobble together monitoring systems that can be disorganized and generate too much noise.

PagerDuty integrates with these systems and aggregates the alerts. When an incident is triggered, notifications are sent via email, SMS, and phone. PagerDuty has developed a unique set of tools to ensure that the right person receives the right notifications (database administrators don’t get pinged about application problems), and 4 am alerts are only sent when absolutely urgent. IT teams can use the software to set up escalation systems, meaning that if one person doesn’t respond, someone else is notified until there is a response. This prevents problems from slipping through the cracks. Scheduling features make it easier to divvy up on-call responsibilities, which also prevents lapses.

“Today, we are the “9-1-1 dispatch” system for IT,” said CEO Alex Solomon in a blog post about the funding. “The next major step in the vision is to expand beyond just the critical incidents. We ultimately will become the central nervous system of IT: we’ll provide the interconnecting fabric between your systems and the people responsible for managing them. Our big audacious goal is to reduce the noise. In other words, only the critical issues should wake you up at 4am, false alerts should be automatically filtered out, and low priority incidents should be surfaced in aggregate in summary reports.”

Clients include high-profile customers like Microsoft, Adobe, EA, Square, Github, Pinterest, Braintree, Heroku, Intuit, 37signals, and Etsy. This first round of investment will go towards hiring more “crazy-smart engineers” for product development and fuel global expansion. In addition to Andreessen Horowitz, the Webb Investment Network, Opscore founder Jesse Robbins, and existing seed investors Harrison Metal, Baseline Ventures, and Ignition Partners contributed.

PagerDuty was founded in 2009 and is based in San Francisco. Read the press release

Boundary, a San Francisco-based startup with a networking monitoring solution, has introduced some new capabilities for developers to track traffic in real-time on cloud-based applications.

In a nutshell, companies are making more regular changes to their applications. Boundary can update developers in seconds, rather than minutes, to prevent problems before they affect quality or service. It is still early days, but the software-as-a-service monitoring startup counts Git Hub, Okta, and Ping Identity among its first 50 customers.

“Most IT management tools were designed in a different era when infrastructure was static,” explained Gary Read, Boundary’s CEO, in an interview with VentureBeat. “It’s no longer acceptable to take a look at your applications every five minutes.” In January, Read joined the startup after leaving Nimsoft, a cloud monitoring company acquired by CA Technologies for a cool $350 million.

Today, large companies are pushing hundreds of updates a day into production, and expect to be able to monitor networks and application traffic flow in real-time, both for public cloud environments like Amazon EC2 and private cloud datacenters.  Read told me that Boundary can monitor every packet that flows to and from every server instance, whether in the cloud, datacenter, or hybrid environments.

Good news for developers: The company is also releasing its free offering, which lets you monitor up to 5 gigabytes of data. This handles an environment of about 25 servers. If you need to upgrade, it’ll cost you. The premium service is how Boundary makes its money.

In addition, the company’s “big data store”, an update announced today, will enable dev-ops to shelve historical data that may prove useful in the future.

Read claims there are no direct competitors, but Boundary operates in the increasingly crowded application networking and monitoring space. Boundary is up against IBM’s cloud monitoring tool, Tivoli, and HP with its suite of OpenView products.

The company was founded in 2011 and has pulled in $19 million in funding to date. The most recent round of $15 million was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Cloud computing image: winui/Shutterstock

New Relic gives companies a way to monitor cloud applications running in real-time to find any bad apples that might be slowing down other web-based services running on Amazon’s EC2 and Rackspace cloud infrastructures. The service targets specific web pages or pieces of code — like a SQL query — that might be slowing a site down and reports it to New Relic users. The company also announced today it is bringing support for applications run in Microsoft’s .NET architecture and PHP for its monitoring service.

Because New Relic is hosting all of its computing power in-house, it’s able to handle the load required for cloud app monitoring with a lower overhead than it would have if it relied on a cloud infrastructure for its processing, said New Relic CEO Lew Cirne.

“We’re continually watching this and providing this depth in Data 24/7 but only at 2 to 3 percent overhead to the site,” he said. “That’s the kind of deep visibility the developers crave to solve production problems.”

New Relic has experienced about 200 percent growth year-over-year growth, and Cirne expects the company to become cash flow positive without having to raise the $50 million that other web-based software-as-a-service companies need, he said.

“The reason why we’re so much more efficient is because our product is so strong that it does 80 percent of its selling to convert the product value into revenue,” he said.

The San Francisco, Calif.-based company was founded in 2008 and raised $3.5 million in its first round of funding and $8 million in its second. Alan & Company also participated in its most recent fundraising round, as well as existing investors Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures. It currently has 32 employees and about 3,000 clients including AT&T, Fox Interactive Media and Thomson Reuters, Cirne said.

[Photo: waffler]