IBM has acquired Instana, an application performance monitoring and observability company, for an undisclosed sum.

With the acquisition of Instana, IBM will help companies overcome the challenge of managing application performance across multiple teams, and across 2 to 15 clouds, on average.

Headquartered in Chicago, with a development center in Germany, Instana provides businesses with capabilities to manage the performance of complex and modern cloud-native applications no matter where they reside – on mobile devices, public and private clouds and on-premises, including IBM Z.

Once Instana’s capabilities are integrated into IBM, companies will be able to feed these insights into Watson AIOps. The information could then be compared to a baseline of a normal operating application, with AI triggering alerts to resolve issues quickly before negative impacts to that transaction or activity.

This can help eliminate the need for IT staff to manually monitor and manage applications, freeing these employees to focus on innovation and higher value work.

Instana will offer both SaaS and on-premises solutions depending on the client’s unique needs.

The deal is expected to close within several months.