Palo Alto Networks Is Buying Embrace to Watch How Real Users Experience Its Customers' Apps

Key points

• Palo Alto Networks announced its intent to acquire Embrace, a software-monitoring company, on an undisclosed date in 2025.
• Financial terms were not disclosed for the Embrace deal.
• Palo Alto Networks acquired Chronosphere, a cloud-monitoring platform, for $3.35 billion in January 2026.
• The company says its observability business has passed $300 million in annual recurring revenue.
• The Embrace deal is expected to close in the first quarter of Palo Alto Networks' fiscal year 2027.

Palo Alto Networks, the California-based cybersecurity firm, announced Tuesday it plans to buy Embrace, a company that makes software for watching how real users actually experience apps, in a move to deepen its push into a corner of the industry called observability.

Observability, in plain terms, means giving companies a single dashboard to see whether their software is working well, where it is breaking down, and why. Palo Alto Networks already sells this kind of tooling, and the Embrace acquisition bolts on a specific slice of it: Real User Monitoring, or RUM, which tracks what real customers see and feel when they open an app, from the first tap on a phone screen through to whatever happens on the company's servers.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Alongside the announcement, Palo Alto Networks revealed a separate, in-house-built product called Synthetics. Where RUM watches real users, Synthetics runs automated, robot-style test visits to apps from locations around the world, checking that everything works before a real customer hits a problem. Think of it as a mystery shopper that never sleeps and reports back every few minutes.

Will this change anything for ordinary app users?

Not directly, but the goal is for the people who build apps to spot slowdowns and crashes faster. The faster a company's engineering team sees that the checkout page is broken, the faster it gets fixed.

Palo Alto Networks' chief product officer Lee Klarich said the aim is to connect these new monitoring tools to the company's AI-powered system, called Cortex AgentiX, so that problems can be detected and fixed automatically, without a human having to log in and investigate.

This deal does not come out of nowhere. Palo Alto Networks paid $3.35 billion for Chronosphere, another observability company, in January 2026. The company says that entire observability line of business now brings in more than $300 million a year in recurring revenue, meaning subscription fees that renew on a regular schedule.

Embracing RUM and Synthetics together is a classic platform play: rather than forcing customers to stitch together tools from several vendors, Palo Alto Networks wants to be the one place where security and performance monitoring live side by side. Whether that pitch convinces buyers away from specialist monitoring vendors is the real test.

The acquisition is subject to standard regulatory and closing conditions. First reported by SecurityWeek, the deal is expected to close in the first quarter of Palo Alto Networks' fiscal 2027.