Red-hot application monitoring startup AppDynamics, Inc. kicked off its annual user conference by announcing that it has closed a $158 million funding round and released a new version of its Application Intelligence Platform  that adds server infrastructure and browser-simulated monitoring as well as support for C/C++ applications and enhanced analytics.

With the new funding, led by  General  Atlantic  and  Altimeter  Capital, among others, the seven-year-old company has now raised $365 million for a total valuation of $1.9 billion, according to TechCrunch. CEO David Wadhwani told TechCrunch that the additional capital presages an initial public offering. ““I was brought in to take this company public, and that’s what I intend to do,” he said.

Unlike traditional application monitoring approaches, the AppDynamics platform takes a user-centric view of an application’s performance, using agents and bots to identify bottlenecks and trace them back to their source across servers, mobile platforms and the cloud. “Our secret sauce is being able to recognize and discover transactions, and understand all the elements that go into them,” said Kalyan Ramanathan, VP of product marketing. “Most competitors monitor servers and storage, but all that provides you is a disjointed view,” he said.

Such capabilities are in high demand by retailers, banks and other businesses focused on electronic commerce. AppDynamics claims to have more than 900 employees and 1,600 customers, including many household-name enterprises. It reported $150 million in bookings a year ago and said it expected to double sales this year.

The new Winter ’16 release of the Application Intelligence Platform adds support for detailed views into the user experience, enabling companies to monitor step-by-step actions as users move through the funnel and identify how application performance impacts their actions. A new feature called “Browser Synthetic Monitoring” enables website performance to be evaluated from dozens of locations around the world and includes competitive benchmarking for comparison purposes.

The addition of server infrastructure monitoring enables IT operations to isolate and resolve server performance issues. The latest release supports Windows servers, improvements to the user interface and the ability to monitor servers that don’t have an AppDynamics agent installed. The company is working on a universal agent for its next version that will simplify deployment of agents.

New C++ support provides for automatic discovery and mapping of all tiers of a service that interact with applications written in C++, which is widely used in high-performance enterprise applications. The company’s exchange platform now also offers nearly 150 extensions for specific applications and infrastructure components.

Analytics has been improved through support for additional data sets, including performance monitoring data, log data and APIs for importing/exporting external data sets. A SQL-like query language has also been added. “You can now do any kind of analytics on our data stores,” Ramanathan said. “In the past we had a visual drag-and-drop approach that was good for non-technical types, but we didn’t have full analytics.”

The company’s platform is priced by a metric called a “unit,” which varies by the amount of resources be monitored. For example, PHP running on a single operating system instance counts as one unit, as does 10 million monitored page views per year. Oracle database monitoring is priced at one unit per eight CPU cores. The platform is priced at $3,300 per year for up to 10 units, with a 10 percent discount for 11 or more units.

Image courtesy AppDynamics