The public cloud is not the most intuitive place from which to track an on-premise network, but a growing number of monitoring startups are moving down that road in the name of high-level visibility, the latest of which exited stealth last week with $12 million in funding to help its spin on the concept stand out. Kentik Inc. hopes to make up for its late entry with scalability.

The outfit claims that its analytics service can find performance issues, suspicious activity and other manner of useful patterns across upwards of trillions of logs, a value proposition aimed at organizations such as wireless providers with exceptionally large network footprints. Few alternatives match the requirement of that segment as precisely, giving Kentik an edge that the venture capital will help maintain.

Of course, monitoring is only one of the many evolving requirements that the world’s top network operators are struggling to address. Much more pressing is the need to track and manage the data moving about within the network, which is the challenge that drove PubNub Inc. to raise $20 million in a funding round of its own last week.

The capital will go towards advancing the startup’s messaging service, which helps distribute the notifications, advertisements and other real-time transmissions that organizations transmit into the connected universe every second. The delivery is handled by 14 data centers strategically located in key regions that enables PubNub to deliver data with sub-second latency to almost any point on the planet with Internet access.

But pushing out that data is only one side of the equation. In the era of historical analysis, communications is often two-sided, with devices at the edge of the network sending feedback back to the backend for advanced processing. That’s where Elastic Inc. enters the picture with its namesake search engine for unstructured data, which became available in two new hosted editions the day after Kentik’s funding announcement.

The software enables organizations to give their business users the ability to quickly filter the vast amounts of information coming off connected devices and other new sources for analysis without having to maintain the necessary infrastructure to support that activity. In the future, subscribers will also receive access to the startup’s complementary data visualization, monitoring and alerting tools.

Photo via Travis Weber