Visa Inc., Fujitsu Ltd. and Comcast Corp. don’t have much in common from a competitive standpoint, but behind the scenes, they all rely on a startup called Indeni Inc. to keep their data centers running smoothly.

The Palo Alto-based firm has quietly emerged as a force to be reckoned within the information technology operations world over the past few years thanks to a unique crowdsourced approach to network monitoring. Today, it raised a $10 million investment led by Sequoia Capital. Indeni will use new funds to widen the adoption of its flagship offering, an infrastructure analysis platform designed to help organizations find and solve issues that are slowing down their traffic more easily.

The software diagnoses problems by checking networking equipment against a continuously updated database of operational information aggregated from customer deployments. Indeni records the configuration of every environment where its platform is deployed, collects various infrastructure statistics and streams the logs to a backend analytics cluster for processing. There, the measurements are integrated with information gleaned off product guides and other user resources from hardware suppliers to create a model of optimal network behavior.

Indeni says that the resulting insights enable its platform to identify a wide range of technical issues. If a company is hit by a sudden traffic bottleneck, for instance, then the software can pinpoint which piece of equipment that is causing the delay.

The timing of the cash infusion is significant. Although Indeni has been making significant inroads into the enterprise market, it’s facing an incredible amount of competition from rivaling monitoring providers. The list includes both fellow startups and established network suppliers such as Cisco Systems Inc. that are likewise working to address companies’ demand for better visibility into their operations.

Image via Indeni