Information technology monitoring startup Coralogix Ltd. today announced that it has closed a $55 million funding round led by Greenfield Partners to expand product development and go-to-market activities.

The investment comes a little less than a year after Coralogix’s previous $25 million round. The startup says that year-over-year growth has tripled in the last 12 months, while its paid customer base more than doubled to more than 2,000 organizations.

Coralogix provides a cloud platform of the same name that enables IT teams to detect when potential malfunctions occur in their companies’ technology infrastructure. Coralogix can spot application-related issues such as when an analytics tool used by a firm’s business analysts suddenly starts loading slowly. The startup’s platform also lends itself to detecting potential cybersecurity issues. 

Coralogix’s flagship feature is an internally developed analytics technology called Streama. The startup says that Streama uses machine learning to reduce some of the main costs associated with monitoring a company’s IT infrastructure by as much as 70%.

To monitor IT infrastructure, administrators collect the large amounts of diagnostics data that is generated automatically by their company’s systems and then sift through the data to find items that may point to a potential issue. The collected information consists mainly of two types of records: logs and metrics. A log is a piece of data that describes a specific event, such a server outage, while metrics provide information on trends, such as a decline that occurs in an application’s performance over time.

The most popular monitoring products for tracking IT infrastructure are billed based on how much data a company analyzes. For enterprises with a large number of systems that generate a lot of data, monitoring-related expenses can add up quickly. The same is true for many tech startups. 

“If I see a company that grew from 50 people to 500 in three years, specifically if it’s cloud native or internet company, I know that their data grew not 10 times, but 100 times,” said Coralogix Chief Executive Officer Ariel Assaraf in a recent interview on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE (below).

Coralogix’s Streama technology facilitates the up to 70% in cost savings the startup promises by prioritizing the data a company uses for IT monitoring. Streama’s machine learning algorithms spot the most valuable records, that is the pieces of information administrators are most likely to use when investigating technical issues, and also identifies the less important data. Coralogix then charges customers a lower fee for the less important data.

One of the ways the startup achieves the cost savings is by storing the different types of data on different kinds of infrastructure. The most valuable records are stored on high-speed and relatively pricey flash storage, which enables administrators to access them quickly. The less important data, meanwhile, is kept on more cost-efficient hardware.

Coralogix says its platform enables companies to further optimize costs by limiting the amount of information they collect from some workloads. For  example, an IT team may determine that it needs to collect fewer diagnostics logs from an infrequently used revenue forecasting application than from a mission-critical supply chain database. Reducing the total amount of data collected for monitoring purposes lowers expenses.

“Instead of ingesting the data, then indexing and storing it, and then analyzing the stored data, we analyze everything. And then we only store what matters,” Assaraf explained. “We go from the insights backwards.”

Lowering IT costs is not the only benefit Coralogix is promising. Normally, to prevent their monitoring expenses from becoming prohibitively high, companies delete the data they collect after a certain period of time. This means that administrators are left with less information about potential technical issues. By lowering the cost of storing monitoring data, Coralogix says that its platform enables companies to keep infrastructure data for longer periods of time and thus retain a more complete understanding of technical issues.

Historical monitoring data is especially useful for cybersecurity investigations. If administrators believe that a system may have been compromised by hackers three months ago, but the company only stores data from that system for one month because of cost constraints, investigating the incident becomes considerably more difficult. The ability to hold  onto historical monitoring data on a long-term basis can simplify cybersecurity investigations considerably. 

Coralogix has raised $96 million in funding to date. Capgemini SE, newly public productivity software provider Monday.com Ltd. and $2 billion developer tooling startup Postman Inc. are among the over 2,000 organizations using its platform.

Image: Coralogix