The 12-month period through March saw Loggly Inc. double both its total user count and the number of paying customers subscribed to its namesake service, momentum that CEO Charlie Oppenheimer is determined to maintain. As part of the effort, the startup this morning raised an additional $11.5  million in funding from True Ventures and a number of other existing investors to step up its growth activities.

Oppenheimer indicated in a press release that a significant portion of the capital will go towards expanding Loggly’s feature set, which is already one of the most competitive in its category. The service enables customers to aggregate their infrastructure logs in a cloud-based console without having to install any local agents and then quickly start extracting the data inside. Much of the credit for the tool’s streamlined user experience goes to its automated parsing feature, which makes it possible to structure incoming records so that they can be processed immediately upon ingestion. From there, isolating operational issues is equally straightforward.

A developer can create specialized dashboards to visualize the data they’re most interested in analyzing, whether it’s performance logs or latency statistics, and have the service automatically flag anomalies. When Loggly finds an issue, they’re able to use its manual diagnostics features to find the underlying cause. The service provides the ability to organize log streams based on attributes like their hierarchy for easy viewing and then monitor the flow of data in real-time to isolate the problematic parts. For added measure, the startup also provides a search engine that users can employ to dig up additional context about the issue at hand.

The entire functionality is available through a graphical interface that is easier to use than many alternatives, an edge that has helped Loggly land deals with Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., Electronic Arts Inc. and several dozen other big brands. The startup service is even more popular among developers, a crowd that it will no doubt work to target too as part of its newly expanded growth effort. But gaining market share will likely prove increasingly difficult amid the growing competition from rivaling log processing providers as Sumo Logic Inc. and Splunk Inc., which are also investing aggressively in customer acquisition.

Image via Geralt