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IBM announced that it is planning to acquire the Chicago-based application monitoring startup, Instana. The startup has raised more than $50 million from investors like Meritech Capital Partners and Accel.

No terms of the deal have been disclosed. Instana’s platform is named after the company and is used by organizations to track their workloads’ status to find technical issues that negatively affect user experience.

They could be latency increases that cause apps to run slowly and errors caused by software bugs. Instana can track all kinds of workloads.

New AI and machine learning capabilities

The company’s platform is used by monitoring apps running on-premises and in the cloud. It can also be used in continuous automated integration and delivery toolchains that developers use to launch new code.

The platform also has clear visibility into the workloads running on IBM mainframes. That particular feature factored into the decision to buy Instana.

The deal will give IBM new AI capabilities. On top of displaying data about app performance, Instana uses machine learning to bring out patterns of interest for IT teams. The platform can create maps of all the components in an app and automatically update the visuals when anything changes.

Troubleshooting will be easy

IT pros can use it to see how different parts of an app depend on other components when troubleshooting problems to see which component originated the error. In other cases, Instana’s machine-learning models can flag the root causes of issues in a system.

IBM will probably integrate the technology into the Watson AIOps platform, which creates a baseline of how the company’s infrastructure is doing. When something is off, it sends the IT team an alert with recommendations on how the problem should be handled.

IBM expects that the deal will be sealed in a few months.