While the industry spotlight was fixed on the success of early cloud-based monitoring providers such as New Relic Inc. and DataDog Inc., an emerging contender called Wavefront Inc. has been quietly building up a formidable customer base in the background.

The startup exited stealth mode today with more than $20 million in financing from Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, and other institutional backers to shift its growth effort into the next gear.

According to our sources, Wavefront raised a seed (priced round) investment from Sutter Hill Ventures which financed Wavefront to get big time traction with paying customers then Sequoia stepped in to lead the Series A – with participation from all the seed investors in the A-round.

The funds will help expand marketing around its namesake infrastructure tracking service, which attempts to stand out from the pack with a native query language for analyzing diagnostics data. According to Wavefront, the concise structure of the syntax makes it possible to perform tasks like comparing the performance of hardware in different regions using only a fraction of the code that competing alternatives require, thereby simplifying the process considerably. The resulting productivity improvement enables administrators to dig deeper into their infrastructure logs than they would normally have the time to do.

One area where the functionality can come useful is addressing slow-burning technical issues that only come into full view after they grow big enough to impede operations. Wavefront provides the ability to quickly examine potential problem patterns that might otherwise take too much time to investigate so as to help identify a malfunction before it has a chance to cause major harm. Built-in historical analysis features also allow administrators to trace an outage back to its source after the fact using built-in historical analysis features, which avoids the need to troubleshoot the failure through tedious trial-and-error.

Wavefront says that queries can be run across millions of data points at a time to uncover the full picture in web-scale data centers with a lot of infrastructure to track. That scalability has proven to be a major boon for some of the startup’s biggest customers, notably Box Inc. and Workday Inc., which rely on its service to support their respective cloud platforms.

Image via Geralt