Palo Alto Networks has announced plans to acquire Embrace and add Real User Monitoring (RUM) to its observability platform. At the same time, the company introduces Synthetics, a new monitoring capability from its Autonomous Digital Experience Management team, to extend the platform into Digital Experience Monitoring.
The company says the goal is to give customers a single view that connects end-user interactions, proactive app validation, backend software and infrastructure.
Lee Klarich, Chief Product & Technology Officer of Palo Alto Networks, “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.”
The Embrace acquisition will bring high-fidelity RUM into the Palo Alto Networks Observability platform. RUM captures how real users experience web and mobile applications, which is different from traditional infrastructure monitoring that mainly tracks servers, services and network behavior. The combination of Embrace’s RUM and its own Synthetics capability will extend observability into Digital Experience Monitoring.
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Synthetics is being positioned as a way to validate application performance from strategic locations around the world before users are impacted.
What the observability platform is becoming
Palo Alto Networks had already moved into observability through its Chronosphere acquisition, which it completed on January 29, 2026. That deal gave the company deeper visibility into applications, infrastructure and AI systems, and it was framed as a way to secure and operate cloud and AI environments with live data.
The new Embrace move extends that strategy; Chronosphere gave Palo Alto Networks the backend observability layer. Embrace is meant to add the user layer. Synthetics fills the active testing layer. Put together, the company is building a more complete monitoring stack that spans user experience, application behavior and underlying infrastructure.
What it means
Palo Alto Networks is trying to move observability closer to digital experience monitoring, where IT teams can see what users see and correlate that with backend problems in the same workflow. Many modern application issues do not begin in the data center; they begin at the point where a user taps, clicks or loads a page.
Palo Alto Networks is positioning its platform as a unified layer for all three, with the added promise that AI agents can eventually help detect and fix issues automatically through Cortex AgentiX.
A typical observability setup usually starts with metrics, logs and traces from applications and infrastructure. Palo Alto Networks is moving beyond that by adding live user-session monitoring and preemptive synthetic checks. That makes the system more useful for teams that need to understand why a mobile app seems slow, why a login fails, or why a checkout flow breaks.
The company completed its Chronosphere acquisition in January 2026, said its observability business passed $300 million ARR in Q3 FY26, and now intends to add Embrace on top of that base. The acquisition is subject to standard closing conditions and is expected to close in Palo Alto Networks’ first quarter of fiscal 2027.
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