IBM Corp. today announced plans to acquire Instana Inc., a Chicago-based application monitoring startup that has raised more than $50 million from investors including Accel and Meritech Capital Partners.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Instana’s namesake platform helps organizations track the health of their workloads to identify technical issues that may interfere with the user experience. The platform can spot issues such as latency spikes that are causing an application to respond slowly and processing errors caused by software bugs.

Instana can track a wide range of workloads. The startup’s platform lends itself to monitoring applications running both in the cloud and on-premises, as well as the automated continuous integration and continuous delivery toolchains that development teams use to release new code. The platform also provides visibility into workloads running on IBM mainframes, a feature that no doubt factored into the company’s decision to buy Instana.

The deal buys IBM new artificial intelligence capabilities. In addition to displaying data about application performance, Instana uses machine learning to surface patterns of interest for information technology teams. The startup’s platform can create a map of all the different components that make up an application and automatically update the visualization when one of the components changes.

IT professionals can view how the different parts of an application depend on one another when troubleshooting a technical problem to identify which specific component caused the error. In some cases, Instana’s machine learning models can also proactively flag the root cause of an issue.

IBM plans to integrate Instana’s technology with its Watson AIOps platform. Watson AIOps creates a baseline model of how a company’s infrastructure normally behaves and, when it identifies an anomaly, sends the IT team an alert along with recommendations for how to solve the problem. 

“The next level of innovation will be an “AutoPilot” for DevOps,” Instana Chief Executive Officer Mirko Novakovic wrote in a blog post today. “ A system that uses AI and machine learning technologies to automate a lot of the manual work that DevOps teams have to do today: troubleshooting problems, rolling back releases, auto-scale to optimize for throughput and cost.”

IBM expects to close the acquisition within a few months.

Photo: George Rex/Flickr