Analyzing infrastructure logs is at once among the most important and the most difficult parts of administrators’ work. The machine-generated data coming off a company’s systems is essential for diagnosing technical issues, but it can be tricky to put into proper context because of the sheer amount being produced. 

Former Google LLC engineers Steve Newman and Steve Czerwinski founded Scalyr Inc. in 2012 to ease the task. The startup, which now has more than 140 customers, this morning announced that it has secured a $20 million early-stage funding round to fuel its work.

Scalyr offers an analytics problem that promises to help administrators dig through their companies’ massive piles of logs for problem indicators quick. According to the startup, its software is up to five times faster than competing products such as Splunk Inc.’s thanks to a data management architecture built entirely from scratch. Many other tools rely on open-source building blocks that don’t necessarily provide the same performance.

Scalyr boasts that users of its platform can search up to 1 terabyte of log data per second. In practice, the startup said, this leads to the overwhelming majority of queries completing almost instantaneously. The result is that administrators can quickly analyze their data from different angles until they find the source of an outage, security breach or any other issue they happen to be troubleshooting.

There’s also a built-in data visualization tool for visually exploring logs. Users can turn their raw system data into an interactive graph to make troubleshooting easier.

Among the companies that rely on Scalyr’s platform are Chinese search giant Baidu Inc., Giphy Inc. and CareerBuilder.

Scalyr also has attracted investors that now include Shasta Ventures, which led the newly announced investment. The venture capital firm was joined by returning backers Bloomberg Beta, Susa Ventures and Heroic Ventures. The new cash infusion from the Series A round brings Scalyr’s total raised to $22.1 million.

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