Palo Alto Networks intends to acquire Embrace, a provider of user-focused observability technology, to add real user monitoring capabilities to the Palo Alto Networks Observability platform. Financial terms of the proposed transaction were not disclosed.
The company is also introducing Synthetics, an internally developed monitoring capability designed to test application availability and performance proactively from locations around the world. Together, Embrace and Synthetics would extend the platform into digital experience monitoring.
Real user monitoring, commonly called RUM, captures performance data from actual customer and employee interactions with websites and applications. It can help companies identify problems involving loading times, crashes, errors and specific workflows that may not appear in infrastructure-level monitoring.
Synthetic monitoring uses automated tests that simulate user actions, such as logging in, completing a transaction or navigating an application. These tests can identify availability and performance problems before they affect actual users.
Palo Alto Networks plans to combine these capabilities with its existing visibility into applications, infrastructure and backend systems. The resulting platform is intended to give customers a unified view extending from a user’s click or tap through the software and infrastructure supporting the interaction.
Embrace’s technology is designed for modern mobile and web applications and provides detailed information about the experiences of individual users. Palo Alto Networks believes this data can help organizations locate the source of complex performance issues more quickly.
Synthetics will use the company’s globally distributed infrastructure to validate applications from different geographic locations. This approach can help companies determine whether a problem is affecting one region, network or customer segment rather than the entire application.
The company also plans to connect the expanded observability platform with Cortex AgentiX. Palo Alto Networks said this integration could allow organizations to identify and automatically remediate certain application and infrastructure issues.
The proposed acquisition follows Palo Alto Networks’ purchase of Chronosphere in January 2026. The company said its Observability platform surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue during the third quarter of fiscal 2026.
The Embrace transaction is expected to close during Palo Alto Networks’ first quarter of fiscal 2027. Completion remains subject to customary closing conditions, and there is no assurance that the acquisition will close on the expected timeline.
KEY QUOTE:
“To truly understand how their applications are performing, organizations need to see the whole picture, from the moment a user taps or clicks to what exactly happens on the backend.”
“By combining Palo Alto Networks’ leading Observability platform with Embrace’s innovative Real User Monitoring and the organically developed Synthetic Monitoring capabilities, we’ll deliver exactly that. And we’re taking it a step further, by linking these capabilities with Cortex AgentiX, organizations will be able to both see and automatically fix issues across their ecosystem. This is what true platformization looks like in practice.”
Lee Klarich, Chief Product and Technology Officer of Palo Alto Networks
