The competition in the analytics ecosystem took a new turn to the public cloud last week after Looker Data Sciences Inc. raised $30 million in funding from a group of prominent investors for its business intelligence service. The capital infusion is meant to help seize accelerating demand in the enterprise.

The startup has signed up over 250 organizations, including a host of major tech firms headed by Yahoo Inc., as customers since hitting the scene two years ago with the promise of taking the pain out of communicating business information across departments. Its namesake platform allows analysts to weave metrics from multiple sources into models that end-users can harness to easily generate custom reports.

Splunk Inc. promises to provide the same analytic power for small operational teams lacking the resources to support a full-blown data crunching cluster with the lightweight version of its namesake software that launched in the backdrop of Looker revealing the new funding. The single-server implementation offers an economic option for analyzing infrastructure logs with incremental pricing.

The release is designed as much to attract small- and medium-sized businesses as lower the adoption barrier for larger organizations that may upgrade to the standard – and more expensive – version further down the road. Enterprises are also the target of the new visualization technology that Datadog Inc. introduced shortly afterwards, which extends the operational picture beyond on-premise infrastructure to the cloud.

The Host Maps now included in the startup’s namesake monitoring software provide a visual view of the servers making up an organization’s environment where each node is displayed as part of the cluster in which it’s deployed and color coded based on key metrics such as free capacity. Practitioners can also drill deeper to identify the services running on each machine and isolate problem patterns across hosts.