Sensu CEO Caleb Hailey (Sensu Photo)

Modern cloud deployments are a tough thing to keep a handle on, which is part of the reason why Portland’s Sensu just raised $10 million in Series A funding to build out its monitoring product.

Battery Ventures led the round, which included participation from existing investor Foundry Ventures. Luke Kaines, founder of fellow Portland open-source startup Puppet, will also join Sensu’s board of directors, the company announced Friday.

Like many an enterprise startup over the past few years, Sensu is building a commercial product around an open-source project. The Sensu project can be used to monitor the health of far-flung cloud services, sending notifications to team members when something has gone wrong and collecting metrics along the way that might help prevent similar problems in the future.

Sensu Enterprise is the commercial version of that project, and it costs between $99 and $999 depending on how many servers you’ll need to monitor your cloud environment. You also get customer service that you won’t get if you try to install the open-source project on your own, a key part of the strategy of many enterprise startups building around open-source projects.

This path can be a difficult one, however, if one of the big cloud providers decides to embrace the open-source project at the core of your business model as a managed service. Bain Capital’s Salil Deshpande is worried about the long-term effects of this trend on the enterprise startup community, as he detailed earlier this year.

But for now, Sensu is chugging along. The company has around 20 employees right now, and plans to exit 2018 with around 50 employees, it said in a blog post. Including the new funding and an earlier seed round, the company has raised $12.5 million.

Like what you're reading? Subscribe to GeekWire's free newsletters to catch every headline

Job Listings on GeekWork

Find more jobs on GeekWork. Employers, post a job here.