While mobile devices and cloud computing have greatly improved the productivity of the average enterprise user, the growing amount of business activity taking place outside the firewall is making it harder than ever for network administrators to do their jobs. A group of high-profile investors including Google Ventures and Salesforce.com Inc.’s private equity arm today poured $35 million into the coffers of a startup called ThousandEyes Inc. that they believe can alleviate the challenge.

The capital will help the San Francisco-based firm spread the word about its namesake monitoring service, which is able to display all the individual network links that connect an organization to the outside world in a single console. ThousandEyes claims that its centralized approach enables administrators to visually trace a traffic bottleneck to its source even if the problem lies beyond their on-premise infrastructure. In such a scenario, the culprit is often one of the numerous third party providers that handle the flow of data among remote corporate systems.

The list includes not only the carriers from which a company buys its bandwidth but also the international network operators with whom those carriers collaborate to handle long-distance connections. The further a user is from the application they’re trying to access, the bigger the number of intermediaries becomes. And that’s not even counting the various traffic filtering and security providers that are often involved as well. ThousandEyes makes it possible to monitor the flow of information through a misbehaving or congested connection in real-time to identify the location of the blockage and adjust the communications path accordingly.

After implementing their workaround, administrators can bring the issue to attention of the affected carrier using the reporting functionality built into the startup’s platform, which provides the ability to share operational data in the form of visual graphs. ThousandEyes also sees the feature coming handy in the event that the problem is not with the connection itself but rather the software-as-a-service provider on the other end. The broad appeal of the service enabled the startup to more than double its bookings in the past year and land major customers such as Electronic Arts Inc. and Twitter Inc.  along the way.

The new funding should help add many more big names to the roster. Besides Google and Salesforce.com, the round also included contributions from institutional heavyweights Tenaya Capital, Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures. ThousandEyes’ total raised now stands at a respectable $60 million.

Image via Geralt