As companies continue moving workloads to the cloud, the demand for tools that can ease the management of infrastructure as a service environments is rising in lockstep. One of the newest players is Botmetric LLC, which today said it has secured a $3 million funding round led by early-stage fund Blume Venture Associates.

The startup has a unique backstory. It was born from a project at Minjar Inc., a well-established cloud automation provider based out of India, that acts as the parent company to this day.

Botmetric sells a management toolkit touted as the highest-rated offering of its kind in Amazon Web Services Inc.’s third-party software marketplace. The platform provides a sleek administrative console designed to cover every major aspect of running a large cloud environment, starting with cost control.

Botmetric has included an extensive set of visualizations in the dashboard to help users check how much their companies are spending on cloud infrastructure. For a more in-depth view, they can bring up a breakdown of the rented hardware in a separate tab. Botmetric highlights underused resources and generates suggestions for how to eliminate unnecessary expenditures.

The platform also looks for technical weak points that may hamper business activity. Botmetric automatically identifies configuration settings that pose a potential security risk and analyzes infrastructure usage logs to spot ways of improving overall efficiency. Administrators can apply the necessary changes with a single click if they’re simple enough for Botmetric’s algorithms to carry out.

As part of its growth efforts, the startup plans to expand those automation capabilities. The startup will also establish a bigger foothold in Silicon Valley to better reach North American companies and simultaneously work to target the Asia-Pacific market.

Botmetric can expect a lot of competition. Besides RightScale Inc., CloudHealth Technologies Inc. and other independent players, the startup will also have to face off against the very providers whose platforms it looks to augment. Microsoft Corp., for instance, recently acquired Cloudyn Software Inc. for $100 million to bolster the automation capabilities available to Azure customers.

Image: Botmetric