Instana today announced the acquisition of three companies that it says adds up to its vision to create an observability tool for modern cloud applications.

The three companies Instana acquired are StackImpact, a production-grade profiler; Signify, a tool for understanding the health of microservices; and BeeInstant, a scalable and performant real-time back end for customized metrics.

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“These are three core technologies that are unique in this [APM] space,” said Mirko Novakovic, founder and CEO of Instana. “This will help us become the number one provider of APM in cloud-native and microservices applications.”

StackImpact, which Instana acquired six months ago, analyzes CPU and memory consumption on a per-method level, Novakovic explained, which can help organizations reduce their cloud bills by optimizing the amount of infrastructure you need in the cloud. This functionality will be available in Instana next month, he said.

Signify was acquired three months ago and Novakovic said the tool “will help us better understand the quality and status of each service in production.” This will be available in Instana beginning next year, he said.

BeeInstant, which Instana acquired in early December, allows developers to store metrics and then aggregate them to be shown in dashboards and alerts. Novakovic said Instana will use BeeInstant as its own back end for its metrics, combined with traces Instana already has discovered, all in real time.

It’s this last metrics piece that Novakovic said will help Instana differentiate from other APM solutions. “We have metrics for infrastructure and applications, but hadn’t focused on back-end metrics,” he said, pointing out that logging, metrics and APM are coming together, along with security. “These different tools categories are merging into observability,” he said. “We needed to invest into these spaces.”

Novakovic noted the acquisition of SignalFx by Splunk, which helped the latter extent its infrastructure monitoring to the application space. For Instana, these acquisitions help it expand its coverage from application monitoring to infrastructure.

Also driving this is the movement in the application and infrastructure spaces, which are blurring together. “Kubernetes, which is kind of like the operating system for the cloud, it’s hard to categorize it as application or infrastructure,” Novakovic said. “And with serverless, the infrastructure is not even visible.”