Loggly raises $4.2M for a ‘fun’ approach to server logs

Loggly, a startup that wants to help manage web applications, has raised $4.2 million in a second round of funding.

The San Francisco company says it’s developing a fun, intuitive tool that will allow IT administrators, app developers, and data analysts search the logs that track server activity. That should make it easier to see how an application is performing and what’s going wrong. And I’m not making up the fun part — Loggly’s website boasts that it will “make looking at logs fun again!”

Two of the company’s three cofounders come from IT search engine company Splunk, but cofounder and chief executive Kord Campbell told me Loggly will be different because it’s web-based, cheaper, and uses open source technologies.

Loggly is currently in limited beta test right now, with hopes to expand to a public test soon. The company says more than 250 people have signed up to participate in the beta.

“The main focus is on scaling the infrastructure to the number of beta customers that we are targeting and making the user experience rich and simple,” said cofounder and Chief Operating Officer Raffael Marty. “Over time we will be supporting more and more use-cases for our users by adding capabilities like a Map-Reduce framework to enable large-scale data processing jobs.

The new round was led by Trinity Ventures. It follows the $500,000 round that Loggly announced at the end of last year from True Ventures, which also participated in the current funding.