Adding to its toolset for cross-platform mobile applications, Microsoft has acquired a small German software company called HockeyApp that has developed a service for crash analysis and beta testing of mobile applications.

Microsoft plans to fold the functionality into its own Visual Studio Online, a hosted service for managing the lifecycles of applications being developed by teams of programmers. There, it will be incorporated into the Visual Studio Online’s Application Insights portfolio of services, now in preview, for monitoring app usage and behavior.

“Integrating HockeyApp crash reports with Application Insights usage analytics will extend device support for Application Insights across all major mobile platforms and make application analytics an ambient part of the application development cycle,” wrote S. Somasegar, Microsoft corporate vice president overseeing the company’s developer division, in a blog post Thursday.

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