Palo Alto Networks announced its fouth acquisition of the year with its intent to acquire observability player Embrace.
Embrace specializes in real user monitoring (RUM) capabilities across mobile and web, and can process user taps, swipes, and clicks into real-time observability insights. As this is not a security-centric tool, it will bolster digital experience in Palo Alto's existing observability platform to solve mobile app crashes, bugs, and application not responding (ANR) issues.
The vendor is an existing partner of AI observability firm Chronosphere, as acquired by Palo Alto Networks at the start of the year. According to Embrace's website, the partnership integrates Embrace’s mobile and web telemetry with Chronosphere’s back-end performance data to simply workflows for mobile and web developers.
Palo Alto Networks is also introducing Synthetics, a new capability leveraging its "globally distributed infrastructure to proactively validate application availability and performance" from strategic locations worldwide.
"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," Palo Alto Networks CTO and Chief Product Officer Lee Klarich explained "By combining Palo Alto Networks' leading observability platform with Embrace's innovative RUM 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."
Besides Embrace and Chronosphere, Palo Alto Networks has this year acquired endpoint security firm Koi Security and AI assembly specialists Portkey.
The Koi Security acquisition saw some legal heat for when U.S. firm MeetiveTV alleged Koi published AI hallucinations in a security report falsely accusing it of Chinese cybersecurity espionage.
As this title found on a deeper inspection of the legal claim, MeetingTV also suggested the blog was released during acquisition negotiations with Palo Alto Networks to showcase and possibly inflate Koi's capabilities.