VMware said it is buying Wavefront, a startup that specializes in metrics monitoring for cloud networking. The acquisition lets VMware “leapfrog into application management of next-generation modern applications,” according to VMware Senior Vice President Ajay Singh. By “modern applications,” he's referring to applications in containers.

Terms were not disclosed. Wavefront was certainly worth tens of millions of dollars, and VMware may have spent as much as $100 million or thereabouts, an estimate based on the amount of venture capital poured into Wavefront coupled with the startup’s recent claim of “hyper growth.” Wavefront attracted $11.5 million in venture capital in its series A in February of last year, followed quickly by a second round in October of $52 million.

VMware was already involved in monitoring virtual environments with its vRealize Operations. Then last year, the company extended its hybrid cloud strategy with the introduction of its Cross-Cloud Architecture and Cross-Cloud Services. The company’s aim, wrote VMware Executive Vice President Shekar Ayyar, is “to enable a common operating environment for both public and private clouds, and to provide new SaaS-based offerings to equip customers to manage, govern, and secure applications running across clouds.”

That created a need to extend vRealize into cross-cloud environments. The acquisition of Wavefront automatically fulfills VMware’s desire to expand its monitoring capabilities into clouds and applications in containers.

“With this acquisition, we are doubling down on Cross-Cloud and management, and increasing our relevance with developers and DevOps teams by providing real-time monitoring of web-scale modern applications that rely on micro-services in containers,” Singh wrote in a blog post today.

Microservices in containers can have lifespans of seconds, spread across private and public clouds, VMware noted. Developers need new instrumentation for their applications in order to identify and fix operational issues in dynamic cross-cloud environments. Wavefront provides metrics monitoring to optimize clouds and modern applications by delivering operational insights using millions of data points per second in real-time, VMware explained.

VMware also noted it would be picking up an “impressive” roster of clients with the acquisition of Wavefront. Wavefront lists among its customers Box, Citrix, Clover, Groupon, Intuit, Lyft, SpaceApe, Snowflake, and Yammer.