Palo Alto Networks Is Buying Embrace to Watch How Real Users Experience Its Customers' Apps
The cybersecurity giant adds user-experience monitoring to its growing observability business, months after spending $3.35 billion on Chronosphere.
Key points
- Palo Alto Networks announced Tuesday its intent to acquire Embrace, a software-monitoring company, on undisclosed financial terms.
- 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.
- A new in-house product called Synthetics will run automated checks on app performance before real users encounter problems.
- The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of Palo Alto Networks' fiscal year 2027.
Palo Alto Networks, the California-based cybersecurity firm, said Tuesday it plans to buy the software-monitoring company Embrace, deepening its push into a corner of the industry called observability.
Observability means giving companies a single dashboard to see whether their software is working, where it's breaking down, and why. Palo Alto Networks already sells this tooling. The acquisition adds a specific slice of it: Real User Monitoring (RUM), which tracks what customers actually experience when they open an app, from a first tap on a phone screen through to whatever happens on the company's servers.
No financial terms were disclosed.
Will this change anything for ordinary app users?
Not directly, but engineers spotting a broken checkout page faster means it gets fixed faster. That's the pitch.
Alongside the announcement, Palo Alto Networks unveiled Synthetics, built in-house by its digital experience team. Where RUM watches real users, Synthetics runs automated test visits to apps from locations around the world, checking performance before a real customer hits a problem. Think of it as a mystery shopper that never sleeps and reports back every few minutes.
Chief Product and Technology Officer Lee Klarich said the goal is to connect these tools to the company's AI-powered platform, Cortex AgentiX, so problems can be detected and remediated automatically, without a human having to investigate.
This deal follows a familiar script. Palo Alto Networks paid $3.35 billion for Chronosphere, another observability company, in January 2026. The observability line now brings in more than $300 million a year in recurring subscription revenue. We covered Chronosphere first on 22 July 2026.
Should the specialist monitoring vendors be worried?
Probably not yet, but the direction is clear. RUM and Synthetics together complete a platform play: one place where security and performance monitoring live side by side, rather than customers stitching together tools from several vendors. Whether that pitch pulls buyers away from dedicated monitoring specialists is the real test, and it'll take a few renewal cycles to know.
The acquisition is subject to standard regulatory and closing conditions. First reported by SecurityWeek, it's expected to close in the first quarter of Palo Alto Networks' fiscal 2027.
