IBM's acquisition of application performance monitoring (APM) platform Instana, earlier this week, is all about cloud-native observability, IBM's Robin Hernandez explained in an interview with SDxCentral.

"Cloud-native architectures have really changed just everything about how people develop applications," said Hernandez, IBM's VP of hybrid-cloud management and Watson artificial intelligence operations (AIOps).

Traditional observability monitoring tools rely on relatively static workloads, which allow pertinent data to be recorded and flagged for anomalies, she explained. Cloud-native architectures are completely different, and how you monitor that is completely different, she added.

"We've been looking at the space for quite a while because we knew that this was a place that we had ... a strong market lead a few years ago before cloud-native architectures," Hernandez said. "We knew we needed to make an investment based on these new architectures; how we would monitor them," and "I think the most exciting thing for us is we did really find the right fit."

Instana, founded in 2015, has focused its efforts on containers, Kubernetes, and microservice application monitoring. Cloud-native architectures can often pose challenges for traditional monitoring approaches as resources can be spun-up and torn down in rapid succession making tracking anomalies and other performance issues much harder.

"We were focused on what vendor knows how to make a very transient set of cloud-native microservices that are moving all over the place, that are across different hybrid clouds, on-premises, and off-premises," said Hernandez.

This was important as IBM's core cloud strategy is centered around flexibility in deployment including hybrid and multi-cloud use cases.

While Instana is a fairly new company, having released its first product in 2017, Hernandez said the companies timing couldn't have been better to focus on the emerging container market.

"Cloud-native architectures were just starting to take off in 2015... and containers were just taking off at that point as the cloud-native standard," she said. "I think coming into the market at that time really allowed them to start with this perspective of cloud-native architectures."

Subject to close, expected to happen later this year, Hernandez said IBM will be looking to integrate the Instana team — approximately 150 employees in the Chicago area and Germany — into the Watson AIOps team.

Assuming the deal closes as planned, IBM will be taking a two-pronged approach to integration, Hernandez explained.

"There are two major areas that we're looking at," she said. "Of course we're looking at our traditional APM and monitoring portfolio... and secondly we're really excited about integrating it with our AIOps solution."

The former is critical as there are thousands of customers using IBM's existing observability platform to monitor their workloads, according to Hernandez. "A lot of our customers still have applications running on these kinds of heritage applications and stacks," she said, adding that many of these customers are now combining traditional workloads with cloud-native software stacks.

In the latter scenario, Hernadez said IBM plans to feed data collected by Instana into its Watson AI platform to plot trends more proactively.

"Ultimately, it's all about automation," she said. "The gift of time we call it. How do we automate processes for [development operations] teams and ultimately give them back the gift of time."