PagerDuty gets $27.2M to become your company's monitor of monitors

PagerDuty, a popular tool among developers and system administrators, stands to get more helpful and less of an annoyance, thanks to $27.2 million in new funding.

Sysadmins and others use PagerDuty to stay on top of alerts from several monitoring tools. Getting those kinds of alerts is often critical (your website is down!) but if they’re not well-managed, these alerts can lead to stress, confusion, and premature hair loss.

The startup announced its new round today, saying much of the new money will go toward product development. In particular, co-founder and chief executive Alex Solomon said in an interview with VentureBeat, PagerDuty wants to stop what some customers have called alert fatigue, which implies being disturbed by too many non-issues.

“Our thinking there … is to build a rules engine to allow our users and customers to set up rules themselves, and beyond that, adding machine learning and intelligence to the system to make it more automated and smarter, so that it’s less manual configuration,” Solomon said.

From there, he said, PagerDuty would like to give people context around the root cause of issues and draw correlations across issues.

Such features could make PagerDuty appeal more to companies’ engineering and operations teams, which often use multiple tools to keep an eye on the health of their services, including AppDynamics, Nagios, New Relic, Pingdom, and Splunk.

Solomon said his startup’s biggest competitors are homegrown tools, but Boundary and OpsGenie could also be considered competitors.

PagerDuty could become even more useful by incorporating better ways to communicate. The startup has connected with collaboration tools like Atlassian’s Hipchat and Slack, but that might not be enough. PagerDuty might evolve by “perhaps building our own collaboration system to help solve problems faster and reduce the resolution time,” Solomon said.

PagerDuty started in 2009. It claims thousands of customers including Adobe, Airbnb, Groupon, Intuit, Panasonic, and theb University of California, San Francisco.

To date the San Francisco-based startup has raised $39.8 million, including last year’s $10.7 million round.

Bessemer Venture Partners led the new round. Andreessen Horowitz, Baseline Ventures, and Harrison Metal also participated.