Infrastructure monitoring tools have grown immensely sophisticated over recent years, but they can still be difficult to deploy and manage on a large scale. The issue is driving organizations towards providers with a more user-friendly approach like Dataloop Software Inc., which raised $5 million today from Battery Ventures and Finald’s Open Ocean to fuel its momentum.

The three-year-old startup’s monitoring system sets itself apart with a self-service interface that removes the need for a company’s IT department to handle all the configuration work. Instead, every engineering team that needs visibility into its systems can create custom dashboards to track the metrics relevant to its work. The arrangement frees up operations professionals to focus on other tasks, while sparing developers the delay of waiting on someone else to set up their diagnostics environment.

Dataloop says that its self-service capability makes it possible to set up a dashboard in minutes and easily add data sources using pre-packaged integrations. In large environments, the process can be automated even further by packaging configuration settings into templates known as Tags. When a new server is added to an environment, all a user has to do is add the Tags that correspond to the information they wish to aggregate and let the tool take it from there.

It’s an appealing value proposition, but Dataloop is hardly the only provider that hopes to unseat the monitoring market’s old guard by beating them on ease-of-use. A similar approach is being pursued by LogicMonitor Inc., which raised $130 million in a funding round of its own last week. And shortly before that, Loggly Inc. received $11 million from a group of investors led by True Ventures. Despite the intense competition, however, Dataloop has already managed to land deals with Salesforce.com, the BBC and several other big-name brands.

Image via Geralt