Cloud management startup Cloudkick raises another $2M

Cloudkick, a startup that helps companies and developers run their applications using online infrastructure, has added another $2 million to its first round of funding.

The San Francisco startup promises to make it easier to manage web applications on infrastructure offered by companies like Amazon, Rackspace, and Slicehost. Its services include dashboards, email alerts, and graphs that show how an app is performing. The core product is free, but Cloudkick recently started charging for premium tools.

Yesterday, the company unveiled a cool addition to these services, an animated three-dimensional graph with dots representing each of the servers used by a customer. As factors like latency and memory usage change, the dots shift on the graph. When there’s a problem, they turn red. Cofounder and chief executive Alex Polvi said this visualizer was built for companies that want to put a big display in their office so everyone on the team can see how the servers are performing.

Cloudkick was incubated by Y Combinator and raised $750,000 from Avalon Ventures and Nueva Ventures back in 2008. The new funding comes from the same investors.

There are a number of other companies offering management tools for cloud apps, including RightScale.