SignalFuse rebrands as SignalFx with an infrastructure-monitoring app and $28.5M

SignalFuse is today coming out of stealth mode and revealing the monitoring web-based software it devised, while also announcing a new company name: SignalFx.

The startup is also announcing that it’s picked up two rounds of venture-capital funding, which come out to a total of $28.5 million.

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The funding suggests that investors agree with SignalFx’s belief that a single number on its own is not helpful enough for people tasked with ensuring that application infrastructure works properly.

“Modern applications are large, they’re distributed, and there are a lot of moving pieces,” SignalFx chief executive Karthik Rau told VentureBeat in an interview. “The only way to understand what’s happening across them is to use analytics. Monitoring is now an analytics problem.”

And SignalFx’s software reflects that. It only surfaces big-picture issues spread out across infrastructure; those issues can reflect a whole bunch of alerts arising in systems that have been hooked up to SignalFx.

Venture-backed SignalFx’s emergence follows recent funding rounds for IT monitoring or alerting startups like Boundary, PagerDuty, and ScienceLogic.

But SignalFx’s service depends on a streaming-analytics engine to detect patterns in all the signals coming in about the health of infrastructure, whether it be in public clouds or in companies’ data centers.

What’s more, the tool could help companies learn about usage of their infrastructure. It could show, for instance, who’s tapping companies’ application programming interfaces, and how often.

Application performance management (APM) companies such as New Relic have been increasingly moving toward this area, but some companies have ended up using such software right alongside SignalFx, Rau said. Meanwhile, log-analytics tools, including Sumo Logic and Splunk, could be useful when it comes to determining what went wrong for a problem in the past, but not for monitoring in the present, Rau said.

If anything, several companies that have adopted SignalFx’s software migrated away from the open-source Graphite tool, Rau said. Customers include Chairish, Symphony Commerce, TapJoy, and Yelp.

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SignalFx started in 2013 and is based in San Mateo, Calif. More than 20 people work for the startup. Rau expects that number to at least double this year.

Charles River Ventures led the most recent round — a $20 million deal — in SignalFx. Andreessen Horowitz also participated.