In a move designed to tap the growing market for tools that monitor and manage cloud-based applications and infrastructure, software provider SolarWinds announced yesterday that it has agreed to a $40 million cash purchase of Librato. The San Francisco-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider specializes in monitoring tools that measure performance of infrastructure and applications hosted in public cloud environments.

Librato has been in business for just over four years, and is led by chief executive and co-founder Fred van den Bosch. The company’s SaaS product provides an analytics platform that monitors real-time operations, and it “accepts metrics from any source for real-time aggregation and transformation, anomaly detection, alerting, visual analysis and storage”, as Librato describes it.

In a press release announcing the deal, SolarWinds noted that “Librato currently enables full-stack performance monitoring of infrastructure and applications on public clouds such as AWS and Heroku, or in a company’s own data centers using a rich set of OSS data collection agents and instrumentation libraries for a variety of technologies and languages.”

Librato’s analytics complement the cloud-based website and application performance monitoring capabilities SolarWinds picked up from its Pingdom acquisition in June 2014. As a result, SolarWinds announced it will combine the two companies into a single brand called SolarWinds Cloud, which will provide what it calls a “unique and complete solution designed to provide visibility from the “outside in” (Web Performance Management) and the “inside out” (Cloud Infrastructure  Management).”

“As we evaluate the growth of the business-critical application, we see three ‘horizons’ of application deployment that require robust performance management – on-premise IT, IT as a Service, and IT in the Cloud,” said Kevin Thompson, president and CEO of SolarWinds, in a statement.

“We expect that the requirement to manage existing on-premise infrastructure will continue, but will now be coupled with the need to manage the performance of infrastructure and applications either fully or partially deployed in private and public clouds. As more and more businesses move aspects of their environments to cloud-based deployment models, we believe we are the right company, with the right product set, to help manage infrastructure performance.”