Palo Alto Networks has revealed plans to acquire Embrace, a specialist in user-centric observability, in a move designed to close the gap between backend monitoring and what customers actually experience on their screens.
The acquisition will bring high-fidelity Real User Monitoring into the Palo Alto Networks Observability platform. Alongside the deal, the company unveiled Synthetics, a proactive application performance validation tool developed internally by its Autonomous Digital Experience Management (ADEM) team.
Together, the two additions extend the firm’s observability offering into Digital Experience Monitoring, giving customers a single, unified picture spanning end-user interactions, proactive app checks and the underlying software and infrastructure.
The company argues that today’s increasingly complex, autonomous applications demand complete performance visibility, while legacy tooling remains fragmented, expensive and prone to missing broken user experiences.
Embrace’s technology is designed for modern environments and aims to help firms ship applications that keep pace with AI-driven scale, while Synthetics will draw on Palo Alto Networks’ globally distributed infrastructure to test availability and performance from strategic locations worldwide.
According to the firm, the combined capabilities will let organisations remove monitoring blindspots through one interface, avoid revenue-damaging downtime by pairing Embrace’s monitoring with its own data analytics to diagnose issues faster, and detect problems before either customers or employees notice them.
The deal follows the company’s purchase of Chronosphere in January 2026, with its Observability business passing $300m in ARR in Q3 FY26. Palo Alto Networks was also named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms for a third straight year and topped the Observability Cost Control category in the 2026 Gartner Critical Capabilities report.
Palo Alto Networks chief product & technology officer Lee Klarich said, “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.”
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