inspectIT is developed by NovaTec Consulting GmbH, an IT consulting company from Stuttgart (Germany), but it has been made open-source in August 2015. inspectIT follows a "user-transaction-centered” approach, whereby the focus is on the analysis of concrete user requests.

For each request against a system which is supervised by inspectIT, a detailed call tree, named invocation sequence, is constructed.

Using this approach, it allows the user to transparently inject measurement points into an application without adapting its source code.

The development of inspectIT started in the year 2005 under the name NovaSpy as closed source software.

On August 14, 2015, inspectIT has been made available as open-source software under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2).