Startup Grafana Labs Inc., which helps companies such as Salesforce.com Inc. spot and fix issues in their information technology infrastructure, today announced that it has closed a $240 million late-stage funding round.

Led by GIC with participation from J.P. Morgan, the Series D round comes only seven months after Grafana Labs closed its previous $220 million Series C raise. After that investment, the startup was valued at $3 billion. Grafana Labs didn’t disclose the valuation at which the funding round announced today was raised.

New York-based Grafana Labs develops Grafana, one of the most popular open-source platforms for monitoring IT infrastructure. Servers, databases and many other components of a company’s IT infrastructure automatically generate data that describes their day-to-day operations. This data contains valuable technical insights that Grafana can analyze to help administrators detect technical issues, as well as find ways to fix them.

Grafana turns data from a company’s infrastructure into graphs to help administrators more easily uncover useful patterns. To ensure IT teams detect technical issues immediately after they emerge, the platform generates alerts when a potential malfunction occurs. Grafana Labs says there are more than 900,000 active installations of Grafana worldwide, up from about 750,000 at the time of its previous funding round seven months ago.

A key factor behind Grafana’s popularity is its extensive feature set. 

Other tools for turning infrastructure data into graphs require users to store the information they’re visualizing in an external database. Grafana, in contrast, doesn’t require an external database, which simplifies users’ work. For cases where it’s not practical to process IT logs in their original format, Grafana provides features that can be used to turn the logs into a form that lends itself better to analysis. 

Over the last few years, Grafana Labs has created several open-source tools to complement the core capabilities of its platform. The newest such tool, Mimir, debuted only a week ago. It’s a time-series database that allows companies to store maintenance information from their IT infrastructure and run analyses.

Mimir is optimized to store metrics, a type of information generated by devices and applications to provide insight into trends that unfold over time. Metrics can, for example, provide insight into how an application’s latency changes over the course of a week. Grafana Labs says Mimir is up to 40 times faster than Cortex, a popular software tool used for the same task.

The startup plans to continue expanding its feature set. Grafana Labs co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Raj Dutt stated today that “our plans are simple: aggressively deliver on our product roadmap and our commitment to embracing the big tent — enabling our users to compose and visualize data from any source — while continuing to build out modern observability capabilities across metrics, logs, tracing and more.”

The 900,000-plus active installations of Grafana Labs’ software support about 10 million users, the startup says. That sizable installed base, which includes many of the world’s largest organizations, gives the startup a significant addressable market. 

Grafana Labs generates revenue by selling a commercial version of its platform that is available as a managed cloud service and in a self-managed edition. The commercial version simplifies the day-to-day tasks involved in using Grafana. The startup’s customer base includes more than 2,000 organizations, including Salesforce.com, eBay Inc., Citigroup Inc. and other big names.

Grafana Labs’ latest funding round comes a few months after another IT observability startup, Chronosphere Inc., closed a significant investment of its own. Chronosphere last October raised $200 million at a $1 billion-plus valuation valuation from a group of investors led by General Atlantic.

Image: Grafana