Having raised $53.4 million in three previous funding rounds while enlisting big-brand reference customers like Airbnb Inc., Netflix Inc., Electronic Arts Inc. and Spotify AB, it would seem that Datadog didn’t really need another big slug of money. But it’s taking the cash just the same.

The maker of cloud monitoring software just closed a $94.5 million oversubscribed series D funding round led by Iconiq Capital LLC along with existing investors Index Ventures, OpenView Venture Partners, Amplify Partners, Contour Ventures and others. The new funding comes almost exactly one year after Datadog raised a $31 million series C round. The company said the cash will be used for new product development and to expand operations into Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Datadog is finding its sweet spot with the many enterprises that are wrestling with the complexity that hybrid clouds present. When virtual machines proliferate into the hundreds or thousands, how do you identify individual bottlenecks that may drag down performance across the board?

“It used to be you provisioned once and then you monitored, but in a cloud world you don’t have that one server anymore,” said Amit Agarwal, Datadog’s chief product officer. “Instead, you have a few servers that do the same work that one server used to do and then you scale out to hundreds of servers if you’re successful.”

Datadog can monitor more than 100 sources ranging from major public clouds to popular open-source platforms and including legacy monitoring systems. It delivers a single view of operations that encompasses alerts, usage analytics, performance metrics, configuration tracking and other information from both cloud and on-premise services.

Datadog monitors a combination of standard operational data – such as memory and CPU usage – and offers optional agent technology to peer inside every server in a cloud environment to look for outliers that are sabotaging performance. The same functionality can be applied to containers, those mini-virtual machines that can proliferate and cause difficult-to-pinpoint performance bottlenecks of their own.

The product’s hybrid cloud functionality has been a particularly appealing feature to enterprises, which are expected to make hybrid private/public clouds the dominant infrastructure-as-a-service architecture for the foreseeable future.

In a hybrid environment, users can specify a local instance of an application and instruct Datadog to find related instances in the public cloud that might be used for “cloudbursting,” or scaling from a private cloud to a public one. “If you run OpenStack locally and cloudburst out to Amazon, we will automatically find all the instances of OpenStack on Amazon that you’re running,” said Agarwal, who noted that about 70 percent of Datadog customers run in hybrid environments. The product works with all major public cloud platforms as well as the most popular OpenStack distributions.

Datadog’s impressive roster of reference accounts is just a small subset of the enterprises that have adopted it, Agarwal said. “We can’t even mention our biggest customers.” The software is sold by a direct sales force at a list price of $18 per host or instance per month, regardless of server size. A free version monitors up to five servers.
Datadog co-founder and CEO Olivier Pomel appeared on theCUBE at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference in June, 2013 (8:04).