Palo Alto-based monitoring company Wavefront today announced it has raised $52 million in Series B funding led by existing investors Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures as well as new investor Tenya Capital.

Wavefront executives said they had originally anticipated a funding round in the $25 million range. They attribute the higher amount of funding to the company's already established software-as-a-service (SaaS) customer base that uses its Wavefront Metrics Monitoring Service, said Pete Cittadini, Wavefront president and CEO.

“We took the money because we wanted the long-term capital risk out of the way of Wavefront’s growth, and now we can look forward and focus on more personnel, small acquisitions, and creating our own cash flow,” Cittandini says. “This round should get us through 2019.”

Wavefront’s primary customer base has been SaaS companies like Lyft, Okta, Workday, and Box. But as bigger companies start moving to software-defined data centers (SDDCs) and cloud, Wavefront has picked up customers like British Gas, Microsoft, and Intuit.

The idea for Wavefront Metrics Monitoring Service was sparked 10 years ago when Wavefront founder and CTO Dev Nag was working at Google and was dealing with very complex infrastructure and massive amounts of data well before other companies.

“We hit the problem of scale using modern architecture before anyone else did, and we had to find a way to monitor everything,” Nag says. “Old approaches of APM and monitoring don’t work today, we are on the forefront of cloud-based business monitoring.”

Wavefront claims that its monitoring system can unify and process millions of data points per second, giving users real-time metrics and root cause analysis. What is different about Wavefront’s approach is that it is not only targeting IT professionals, but is developer-friendly as well.

Wavefront allows users to ask custom questions about their system during a real-time operational crisis and receive a real-time response. It achieves this by comparing what part of an infrastructure is acting differently at the time of an issue to identify the root cause, avoiding both false positives and false negatives.

The company currently has about 40 employees and expects that number to grow to 70 by the end of 2017.