LightStep Inc., an application monitoring startup founded by two former Google LLC engineers, today announced that it has raised a $41 million funding round to fuel its growth.

Uber Technologies Inc. backer Altimeter Capital led the investment with participation from Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures and others. The round, LightStep’s third to date, brings its total outside capital to $71 million.

The San Francisco-based startup offers a platform that helps companies monitor their applications for issues such as performance hiccups and latency spikes. LightStep created the offering with a particular focus on workloads built using software containers. Enterprises are adopting containers en masse because they allow code to seamlessly run across different types of infrastructure, including both on-premises and cloud environments.

LightStep’s platform collects data about applications using software agents it dubs Satellites. This information is sent to the cloud, where it’s processed with a combination of statistical models and input from administrators about how they want to monitor operational metrics.

LightStep presents the condensed data in a visual view intended to make it relatively straightforward to spot notable events. The startup’s platform displays anomalies not in isolation, but rather as part of chronological charts that enable administrators to see how a given application behaves over time. It pairs this high-level view with the ability to zoom into specific data points.

Administrators can use an automated path tracing tool built into the platform to track each individual change to its source. An engineer could, for example, follow a database request to the application that made it and the mobile client from which that application was accessed by the end-user.

The company’s customer base features quite a few familiar names from the tech industry. Among them are DigitalOcean Inc., Lyft Technologies Inc., Twilio Inc. and Microsoft Corp.-owned GitHub. LightStep Chief Executive Ben Sigelman (pictured) offered a glimpse at how organizations are applying LightStep’s technology in an appearance on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE studio.

“DigitalOcean says they’re saving something like 1,000 engineering hours a month on LightStep, it’s a huge time saver for people trying to get to the bottom of issues,” Sigelman explained. “Every second counts, seconds cost hundreds of thousands of dollars for any big outage for some of our customers. We help people get to those incidents 92 percent faster.”

Photo: SiliconANGLE