Asserting that application monitoring technology designed for the age of monolithic computers hasn’t kept pace with today’s highly containerized and distributed environments, SignalFx (formerly SignalFuse) is emerging from stealth today with a fresh $28.5 million funding round and technology that it says approaches monitoring from a radically new perspective.

The Silicon Valley company, whose co-founders hail from Facebook and VMware, Inc. says distributed applications have introduced complexity that frustrates the ability of traditional monitoring systems to provide meaningful information. Applications are now deployed across large numbers of virtual machines (VMs), making the alerts that have traditionally been used to signal problems far less meaningful.

Other factors have also changed the landscape, said Founder and CEO Karthik Rau in an interview with Jeff Frick, general manager of theCUBE. Software built for the cloud now changes frequently, with updates being pushed out daily in many cases. Applications are also more likely to be deployed and managed by end-user rather than IT organizations, he said.

As a result, alerts can degrade into background noise that doesn’t help administrators pinpoint problems. “It’s very noisy to fire off alerts when you’ve got thousands of VMs,” Rau said. “If one node is down, that doesn’t mean that your application is in trouble.”

Nevertheless, enterprise monitoring technologies “haven’t evolved much in the last 15 or 20 years,” Rau added. That forced companies like Facebook, where SignalFx co-founder Phillip Liu worked for four years, to build their own monitoring technology. “We had a fundamental vision that monitoring for modern applications is now an analytics problem,” Rau said.

SignalFx aims to capture streaming and historical analytics technology on operational metrics at large scale to provide an interactive, system-wide view of applications and infrastructure. It uses data collected from thousands of sources to create aggregations like percentiles, moving averages and growth rates within seconds. That enables administrators to set alerts based upon anomalies rather than individual faults.

The company says its approach is better suited to a new world in which “a lot of problems introduced into environments are human problems,” Rau said on theCUBE. ”A new user gets on board and all of a sudden there’s a 10X impact on your systems. When you can quickly understand everything that’s going on in the environment you can detect these changes and quickly decide what your next step should be.”

SignalFx hits the market at the end of a six-month beta test with paying customers already on board. It emerges from stealth with 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. The company said it will use the funds for sales, marketing and research.

Watch the full interview (10:24)