Application monitoring startup Instana Inc. has parted ways with a chunk of the $30 million in venture capital it raised last year, buying up two startup companies and the technology assets of a third.

Instana today said it’s buying outright both BeeInstant Ltd., which provides high-frequency metrics analysis tools, and StackImpact GmbH, which sells application profiling software, though it didn’t disclose for how much. It’s also buying technology called Signify from a company called JINSPIRED B.V. that provides insights into “complex system signals,” it said.

All three acquisitions are designed to enhance Instana’s application performance management capabilities so as to help its customers “build, deliver and operate” better performing software and services, the company said.

Instana has quietly built up a following in the last couple of years thanks to its monitoring platform that’s specifically geared toward applications built atop software containers, in which applications are run on multiple computing platforms. Enterprises are adopting containers en masse because they’re more efficient than traditional server virtualization and are platform-agnostic, meaning they can be migrated across different types of infrastructure with relative ease.

Containerized applications are characterized by their modularity. The components that make up a workload run as microservices, a collection of loosely coupled containers that may be modified separately from one another. This approach simplifies tasks such as rolling out updates but makes it tricky to understand the inner workings of an application, which is what Instana’s monitoring platform was built to overcome.

Instana’s software works by automatically mapping out the structure of a workload and providing visibility into how the individual components interact with one another.

Moreover, Instana keeps up with every change made to an application. That’s handy because containerized applications tend to be updated much more frequently than traditional software, in some cases as often as multiple times a day, since their modularity allows developers to modify components faster.

Instana said it’s working to integrate all three technologies into its application performance management platform, but hasn’t said when the new features will be made available to customers.

Image: PublicDomainPictures/Pixabay