Cloud-based application monitoring startup Scalyr Inc. today is updating its platform to make it easier to monitor and troubleshoot Kubernetes environments.

The company is also adding support for Amazon Web Services Inc.’s CloudWatch monitoring and management service.

Scalyr stepped up into the spotlight late last year when it secured a $20 million early-stage funding round led by Shasta Ventures to build out its software, which helps administrators dig through massive piles of information technology system logs in order to find problem indicators more quickly.

Founded by ex-Google LLC engineers Steve Newman and Steve Czerwinski back in 2012, Scalyr is a rival to larger operators such as Splunk Inc. However, the company said its platform can generate insights five times faster than Splunk’s competing tools, thanks to its data management architecture that was built entirely from scratch with proprietary software.

Scalyr reckons its platform is fast enough to search up to a terabyte of log data per second, which means it can deal with the vast majority of queries instantly. The idea is that admins can use Scalyr to 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. Users can then access Scalyr’s data visualization tools to explore the data logs and find the exact cause of whatever issue they’re trying to fix.

It comes as no surprise that Scalyr wants to be able to troubleshoot issues with Kubernetes too. Kubernetes has in the last couple of years emerged as the most popular tool to manage software containers, which are used to host applications that can run on any kind of infrastructure without changes to their code. With the new Kubernetes cluster-logging feature, Scalyr’s users can now monitor these environments more easily using a platform they’re familiar with.

In an interview with SiliconANGLE, Scalyr Chief Executive Steve Newman said Kubernetes was a priority for the company as many of its customers already rely on containerized microservices to build their applications. However, he said a lack of troubleshooting tools meant developers were spending too much time on fixing problems with their apps instead of building them.

“Organizations are shifting away from monolithic architectures to deliver software in modern ways, but the tools to successfully navigate the complexities of systems like Kubernetes aren’t widely available,” Newman said. “With these new product updates, we’re doubling down on our commitment to provide effective operational visibility for complex environments, while making it easier for Kubernetes users to understand cluster and application health.”

One of the key differences between Scalyr’s Kubernetes monitoring tools and those provided by public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc. and Google LLC is its central, integrated approach, Newman said. He said that microservices and multicloud environments present unique challenges when it comes to determining the root cause of application and system issues, and that there’s a need for real-time issue identification and resolution.

“These modern systems generate enormous amounts of data,” Newman said. “Scalyr provides the performance and scalability to ingest, aggregate, and analyze this flood of information in real time.”

Scalyr’s latest release also adds support for AWS CloudWatch, which is a similar service that’s used to monitor apps running on Amazon’s public cloud platform. Now, users can simply drop CloudWatch logs directly into Scalyr, where they gain a more “holistic view” of their application’s performance.

Other new features include “chart annotations” that can be added to highlight performance issues and shared with coworkers. There’s also a new “stack tracing” feature that allows users to jump from their log search directly to the reference source code in their repositories with just one click.

Scalyr said the update to its platform will roll out before year-end. The company will demonstrate the new capabilities during the AWS re:Invent conference, which kicks off in Las Vegas on Nov. 26.

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