Organizations have a wide variety of tools at their disposal for monitoring their cloud expenses, and there’s an even bigger selection of services designed to help track operational parameters like performance. But only a handful of vendors provide the ability to do both in the same interface. Among them is CloudHealth Technologies Inc., which has secured $20 million in funding from a group of investors led by Sapphire Ventures to try and take better advantage of its position.

To that end, the startup will use the capital to finance the development of new capabilities for its management service. One of the first items on the agenda is adding broader integration with popular infrastructure-as-a-service platforms such as AWS and Azure. CloudHealth also plans to hire more marketers and salespeople to promote its value proposition, which hinges on the idea that deploying a unified monitoring tool is preferable to using multiple point-solutions.

For starters, it removes the need to deal with more than one vendor, a major time-saver for organizations with complex licensing requirements. And second, CloudHealth says that having all the operational metrics from an infrastructure-as-a-service deployment in the same view makes it simpler to identify patterns that might not be so easily discernible otherwise. For instance, its service lets administrators correlate performance trends and usage to see how different activity patterns affect their environments. Security logs can be added to the mix as well to identify application behavior that might make an organization vulnerable to hacking.

CloudHealth performs the analysis automatically and then generates recommendations for how to best address the operational shortcomings that are discovered during the review. According to CloudHealth, it takes only a few clicks to implement the advice produced by its algorithms. Organizations with more advanced requirements are able to complement the capability by configuring workflows that can automatically trigger an action in response to a certain event like a virtual machine malfunction. The feature kills two birds and reduces the amount of troubleshooting that the IT department has to perform while facilitating faster response to important changes.

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