Network management vendor Opnet on Monday announced it has acquired Network Physics for $10 million in a deal that will give Opnet the tools it needs to manage end-to-end application performance.

Opnet, maker of capacity planning products such as IT Guru and network security audit tools such as IT Sentinel, will couple Network Physics' NetSensory technology with Opnet's ACE application to offer customers application performance monitoring. Network Physics packaged its NetSensory technology on appliances that would monitor traffic to measure application usage and performance. And Opnet recently announced it would add user perspective monitoring to its ACE products. Combining the technology, Opnet says, will enable customers to monitor application performance from the back-end systems to the user machine.

Network Physics competed with companies such as NetQoS and NetScout, which recently acquired Network General to augment NetScout's application performance management capabilities with Network General's network intelligence. NetQoS partners with Network Instruments to do the same, and industry watchers say vendors will continue to converge network and application management products to better address enterprise customer needs.

"[The Network Physics] acquisition provides Opnet with one of the technically most powerful engines for monitoring application traffic across the network with a high level of application awareness, and interrelated insights into traffic volumes, routed paths and application performance and response," said Dennis Drogseth, vice president at Enterprise Management Associates, in a statement.