In 2014, Facebook Inc. open-sourced a homegrown tool called Osquery that was created to help its engineers better monitor internal infrastructure. Kolide Inc., a startup that counts the project’s two main developers as co-founders, now wants to commercialize the technology.

Kolide announced today that its effort has attracted a $8 million investment led by Matrix Partners. In conjunction, the startup launched Kolide Cloud, an osquery-based platform designed to provide insight into not only backend infrastructure but also employee devices.

The cloud-based offering can collect detailed operational information about endpoints via a monitoring agent that takes as little as two minutes to install. Using the features carried over from Osquery, Kolide Cloud then organizes the logs into a database that lets administrators look for problem indicators across all the monitored systems.

The platform lends itself to two main use cases: cybersecurity and compliance. A company can, for example, harness Kolide Cloud to find employee devices that don’t have disk encryption enabled. The security team could then warn the affected workers not to download sensitive files until the issue is fixed. Kolide said its platform automatically matches endpoints to the appropriate staffer via an integration with G Suite, which saves administrators the hassle of manually figuring out whom a device belongs to.

The startup said the offering also makes it possible to look for a wide range of potential problems in a company’s backend systems. Kolide Cloud enables administrators to find issues such as misconfigured firewalls and lax access permissions, as well as look for specific user activity that may violate security rules.

The core feature set is complemented by several additional capabilities. One of them is a desktop app that, according to Kolide, gives users insight into any security problems with their devices. Administrators, in turn, have access to a notification tool they can use to receive updates on events that affect important infrastructure and applications.

The newly announced $8 million round puts Kolide in a better position to pursue its commercialization efforts. The startup should benefit from the existing popularity of Osquery, which has been deployed at companies such as Atlassian Corp. plc and Amazon.com Inc. subsidiary Twitch since it was open-sourced by Facebook.

Image: Kolide