Scalyr, the log management and server monitoring service created and run by two former Google engineers, announced today that it raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Shasta Ventures with participation from earlier investors Bloomberg Beta, Susa Ventures and Heroic Ventures.

"We've had a lot of success with early sales. Once customers see they can resolve issues 5X faster, it's a no-brainer," said Scalyr Founder and CEO Steve Newman, a repeat entrepreneur whose last company-Writely-was acquired by Google to become Google Docs. "Now we just need to spread the word, scaling up sales and marketing. We're also expanding our engineering and product teams. We've only just begun to shake up operational visibility."

Drawing on years of experience processing massive datasets while working together at Google, Newman and his co-founder Steve Czerwinski started Scalyr in 2011. Their aim was to simplify the business of understanding the behavior of modern, complex cloud stacks. From the start, they chose to build their data management engine from the ground up, avoiding the legacy document indexing technology used by competitors.

Up to 1000x Faster

In real-time, Scalyr aggregates a company's server logs and metrics into a centralized system for analysis and troubleshooting. Scalyr's unique architecture takes advantage of the cloud's economies of scale and allows for efficiencies unseen in rival log management systems. For the company's 140 customers-which include CareerBuilder, Business Insider, OkCupid, Baidu and Giphy-this means they can spot problems earlier and faster. In fact, the company reports:

Engineers can search 1 terabyte of log data per second
96% of searches on Scalyr take one second or less
What used to take customers half an hour only take a few seconds using Scalyr, making the service up to 1000x faster than the competition
We've never lost a customer
"This is one of the most exciting enterprise software companies I've seen," said Jason Pressman, Managing Director at early-stage venture firm Shasta Ventures. "Not only is Steve a world-class founder and company builder, but he's also a true engineer's engineer. He's knows first-hand the pain points in today's agile DevOps groups and IT departments, and he founded Scalyr to help engineers-in real-time-solve these problems as fast as possible. Scalyr has a brilliant founding CEO, an amazing product and a loyal and growing customer base. We couldn't be more thrilled to be partnering with Steve and his team to support them on their mission to build an extraordinary company!"

A lifelong engineer and serial entrepreneur, Newman's earlier startups include Writely, San Andreas Systems (a graphical web page builder acquired by Claris); Bitcraft (acquired by Macromedia); and Peninsula Game Works (makers of Spectre, the first 3D multiplayer game on the Macintosh).

"The cloud is enabling systems of ever-increasing scale and complexity-it's a mixed blessing," said Newman. "At Scalyr, we're leveraging the cloud's scalability to solve operational complexity, making it easy-even fun-to sift through mountains of log data and understand system behavior. We are really just getting started and are excited to have Jason and the Shasta team as partners in this next phase."

About Scalyr

Scalyr offers a cloud-based platform for high-speed log management and server monitoring. Founded by one of the creators of Google Docs, Scalyr brings the speed and ease of use normally found in consumer apps to an incredibly powerful server monitoring tool. 96% of all queries complete in under a second, and there's no need to learn a complex query language. Notable customers include OkCupid, Zalando, Grab, CareerBuilder and Wistia.