SignalFx, provider of an advanced monitoring platform for modern applications, emerged from stealth and announced a $20 million Series B funding round led by Charles River Ventures with participation from existing investor Andreessen Horowitz, bringing the company's total financing to $28.5 million.

SignalFx will use the funds to significantly expand sales and marketing and to accelerate R&D focused on solving the monitoring problems of the $100 billion cloud software market.

Devdutt Yellurkar, General Partner at Charles River Ventures, will join the SignalFx Board of Directors which includes Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz Founder and Partner; SignalFx Founder and CEO Karthik Rau; and SignalFx Founder and CTO, Phillip Liu.

SignalFx also unveiled its advanced monitoring platform for modern applications. Built by inventors of cloud-scale monitoring technologies for today's Internet giants, SignalFx is a SaaS-based monitoring platform that uses SignalFlow streaming and historical analytics technology on operational metrics at any scale to provide an interactive, system-wide view of applications and infrastructure. The distributed and dynamic nature of modern applications has turned monitoring into an analytics problem — SignalFx enables development and operations teams to shift from component-level monitoring to detecting aggregate patterns and anomalies across their distributed applications in real time.

"Today's applications are often composed on many services and/or microservices that function with high levels of autonomy. Optimizing the availability and performance of today's applications is virtually impossible with traditional monitoring tools," said Stephen D. Hendrick, Principal Analyst for Development and Deployment Research at ESG. "This is why tools such as those from SignalFx that monitor and analyze application performance in real time are now a necessity."

SignalFx equips organizations of all sizes to make better decisions based on a data-driven approach to application design and operations. Designed to enable organizations to submit multi-dimensional metric data at any scale, SignalFx allows product teams to model and correlate key application and business metrics against underlying infrastructure behavior to answer critical questions about operations.

Developers, operations, DevOps and SRE teams can benefit from SignalFx application and infrastructure monitoring technology:

- Meaningful and actionable alerting: Traditional monitoring solutions set alerts using static thresholds on metrics collected from individual components, resulting in noisy alerts for distributed applications. SignalFlow streaming and historical analytics technology enables product teams to apply custom analytics pipelines on metrics collected from thousands or more sources to create meaningful aggregations (percentiles, moving averages, growth rates, etc.) within seconds of receiving data. These real-time aggregations can be compared against historical patterns to allow product teams to set alerts based on anomalous trends.

- Interactive, system-wide visibility: SignalFx delivers unparalleled self-service access to all of the application and infrastructure metrics most critical to the success of an application. Product teams can model and see the impact of metrics like customer usage on infrastructure performance and business KPIs. The real-time, interactive nature of SignalFlow technology enables organizations to ask and answer questions about their operations as events are still occurring in their environments.

- Cross-team communication: Applications with microservices architectures have several interdependencies and require a high level of coordination between teams. SignalFx provides a single source of context where teams may curate dashboards with key metrics to share and get insight into the operational characteristics of any service.

"Today's launch of SignalFx is just the beginning of our team's work to reinvent monitoring for modern applications," said Phillip Liu, Founder and CTO of SignalFx. "An analytics-based approach to monitoring is essential for modern applications — with SignalFx and SignalFlow technology, our customers can focus their efforts on interpreting operational metrics, discovering key patterns, and communicating insights with one another rather than building and supporting an undifferentiated metrics infrastructure. We plan to invest aggressively in our monitoring platform so that our customers can deliver well-built, reliably performing, rapidly improving applications time and time again."

"The move towards SaaS and cloud business models has introduced a major disruption in the world of downstream operations management products, with the monitoring category at the center of this disruption," said Devdutt Yellurkar, general partner at Charles River Ventures. "SignalFx is truly changing the game for monitoring modern applications with its breakthroughs in streaming analytics technology. The opportunities that lie ahead for the company are massive and as a board member, I'm looking forward to working with a talented and experienced team to lead the way to the future of application and systems monitoring technology."

"The developers and DevOps teams running modern applications need a monitoring platform that supports dynamic and distributed architectures," said Karthik Rau, Founder and CEO of SignalFx. "Our engineers have been instrumental in pioneering monitoring solutions for leading Internet giants and have unique insight into what it takes to address the analytics gaps required to solve today's monitoring problem."