IBM is acquiring application performance monitoring and observability provider Instana in a deal that furthers Big Blue’s hybrid cloud focus.

The Instana assets will provide IBM with deeper DevOps visibility to support closed-loop automation, more context to support deeper insight, and can use artificial intelligence (AI) to resolve problems. It will also allow customers to feed that insight into its Watson AIOps platform. This will allow those customers to monitor their applications and use the Watson AI to trigger alerts.

Pratik Gupta, CTO of IBM Hybrid Cloud Management, explained in a blog post that Instana’s platform “brings a host of leading capabilities, such as a comprehensive collection of application tracing and dependency, relating of logs, metrics and dependencies, automated and instant instrumentation, and it is designed for AI-based root cause analysis and high cardinality analytics.”

Gupta also noted that the Instana platform was designed for cloud native platforms like Kubernetes and microservices and that it supports common open source monitoring tools like Prometheus and OpenTelemetry.

Financial terms of the deal were not released, though Instana has raised $57 million in funding. The company is headquartered in Chicago, and has a development center in Germany.

Instana recently updated its platform with a new custom dashboard that allows customers to tailor their monitoring tools to make relevant information more accessible without the need for a comprehensive understanding of Instana’s data and user interfaces. It also added support for Nginx web-server tracing, Redis Enterprise and IBM MQ monitoring sensors, and role-based access control.

Instana itself has been an active acquirer. Late last year it bought BeeInstant, StackImpact, and Signify in a three-course meal of an acquisition.

IBM’s recently installed CEO Arvind Krishna has pressed the company toward a greater focus on hybrid cloud development. Most of this work has been on the back of its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat. Krishna last month also announced plans for IBM to spin off its legacy services business so that it could continue to focus on its hybrid cloud operations.