ScriptRock Inc, pioneers of configuration monitoring, announced today their $8.7M Series A round of funding. August Capital led the round, which included previous investors Valar Ventures and Square Peg Capital.

Enterprise veteran Vivek Mehra of August Capital will be joining ScriptRock's board to guide them along the path traveled by Splunk, another early stage August investment now valued at $4.8B. Mehra is also known for his aggressive positioning of Cobalt Networks, which sold to Sun Microsystems for $2B following a successful IPO. Scott Petry, founder of Postini and Authentic8, is joining ScriptRock's board of directors, further bolstering ScriptRock's enterprise expertise. Square Peg Capital's investment was led by Paul Bassat, a fellow Australian and founder of Seek, the world's largest jobs site. Peter Thiel, the well known Facebook investor and cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, saw the promise of ScriptRock early on and has subsequently invested in all rounds.

With the addition of board members experienced in building world class enterprise service providers, ScriptRock is now positioned to lead the growth of operations as a service.

The company has come a long way -- in just a few years ScriptRock has moved from Australia to Mountain View, CA, and grown into a trusted provider of server management for enterprise level operations. Founders Alan Sharp-Paul and Mike Baukes, veterans of the financial technology industry who have referred to themselves as 'corporate refugees,' created GuardRail to address the problems they experienced firsthand working in enterprise IT.

'GuardRail solves a real problem,' said Sharp-Paul. 'Whenever we show people who develop or release software, they just get it. They know how costly it is to identify configuration problems, especially once they've already been deployed. This is their silver bullet.' Added Baukes, 'People will use GuardRail if they aren't stupid.'

Their unique perspective on DevOps is based on an actual working relationship. Sharp-Paul and Baukes worked on opposite sides of the proverbial wall within corporate IT, Baukes as a sysadmin and Sharp-Paul as a developer. Their frustration with what they saw as a broken process drove the design of GuardRail, ScriptRock's configuration monitoring platform.

While other companies focus on automating server configuration, GuardRail addresses a more fundamental problem. Knowing the differences between hundreds or thousands of servers is a vital precursor to automation, and no existing software provides a sufficient solution. GuardRail is the missing link that gives developers and operations visibility into their systems' states.

'We've got a great team and we've worked hard to get to this important milestone,' said Baukes. 'I'm proud of the product we've built and excited that we're now able to bring it to an even larger audience.'

About ScriptRock
ScriptRock is a pioneer in configuration monitoring and operations as a service. Their flagship product, GuardRail, enables anyone to discover their datacenter and accelerate their release cycles.