New Relic has boosted its artificial intelligent quotient by buying SignifAI, a three year old company that has previously promised its service acts as a virtual SRE for ops teams.

SignifAI describes its technology as “An AI and machine learning powered correlation engine for DevOps and site reliability engineers.” The platform has integrations with over 60 monitoring tools and services, including the AWS and Google Cloud platforms – but not apparently Azure – and monitoring platforms including DataDog, SumoLogic and New Relic.

The service hit general availability back in May 2017, though software analytics specialist New Relic’s announcement said it “intends to bring SignifAI’s technology to market, offering modern software teams advanced technology to predict and address performance issues, so they can deliver exceptional customer experiences.”

In a blog post flagging the buy, New Relic’s chief product officer Jim Gochee wrote: “One of SignifAI’s early principles was the idea of a ‘Virtual SRE’ – the ability to see and make sense of all your operational event data, from alerts to change events, regardless of source, and correlate them as a seasoned SRE would.”

It “sits above the monitoring tool layer, ingests the alert data, and then applies intelligence to it—telling you where to look to solve the problem.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and there was no information as to whether SignifAI’s technology would continue to be offered as a standalone service, or would be entirely absorbed into New Relic’s platform.

Gochee wrote, “One thing we love about SignifAI’s approach is its commitment to an open correlation and event intelligence platform that is source agnostic. We’re excited to extend this approach into the New Relic platform.”

Gochee added that New Relic had been wary of overplaying the role of AI i its products, and had avoided the term AIOps.

However, that didn’t stop the company from headlining its announcement of the deal with the term AIOps, and describing its new buy as “specializing in artificial intelligence and machine learning.”

Cisco’s AppDynamics declared its hand in the AIOps space last month, with the unveiling of its Cognition Engine, based in part on technology it picked up through its purchase of Perspica.

The deal was announced in parallel with the announcement of New Relic’s third quarter results, which showed revenues up 35 per cent to $124m for the quarter ending December 31. This resulted in a net loss of $10.2m, compared to a $7.7m loss the previous year.