Boundary, a real-time network monitoring-as-a-service (MaaS) start-up that's been pretty sub rosa since it got organized last year, surfaced Tuesday sporting a Big Data analytics platform as well that's supposed to do what Hadoop and Cassandra do but a thousand to tens of thousands times faster.

The company was started by CEO Benjamin Black, who was engineering director at Microsoft Windows Live involved in building one of the largest content delivery networks in the world and co-authored the first documents on what would become EC2 as principal engineer for Amazon infrastructure. He also led the design and implementation of new layer 3 network for Amazon's production network.

Boundary's been operating since January on $4.1 million of Black and LightSpeed Venture Partners' money spent in part apparently on Boundary's own infrastructure.

Its widgetry, currently in beta, works with public clouds like EC2, of course, and private clouds and across physical and virtual systems.

So far it supports Ubuntu 10.04 and CentOS 5.x. Red Hat, Windows and Apple are coming.

It says its "high-resolution monitoring analyzes and visualizes traffic flows at one-second granularity across millions of simultaneous metrics. Typical systems use one-minute and 15-minute averages that are unable to detect transient spikes and behavior changes inside an application or service - whether it's between application, Memcached and database server instances or across Amazon EC2 availability zones, regions or private data centers."

It says there are no complicated or complex customizations.

Boundary is supposed to make high-volume, real-time operations monitoring simple. Its meter is a drop-in and reportedly takes just minutes to be up and running. No hardware probes or appliances are required.

It's got web browser dashboards to supply continuous visibility and they can be customized and integrated with Boundary's API.

GigaOM says, "Each agent has its own credentials so it's not bound to a VM. That means if an Amazon instance disappears, for example, the agent can get certified as it pops up again on a fresh virtual machine. Most old-school network monitoring software requires the network to stay fairly static, something that doesn't happen in a virtualized world."