Palo Alto Networks Buys Chronosphere: Will Observability Fuel Growth?

Palo Alto Networks (PANW) recently agreed to buy Chronosphere for $3.35 billion. The acquisition is expected to strengthen Palo Alto Networks’ ability to support companies that run large cloud and AI workloads. Chronosphere provides a cloud-native observability platform that helps businesses monitor their systems, find problems quickly and keep applications running without long outages. Moreover, Chronosphere already supports leading AI-native companies, including major large language model (LLM) platforms.

Today, many observability tools are costly and struggle with the large amount of data created by AI systems. On the first-quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call, Palo Alto Networks said that this is a growing issue as AI data centers move huge amounts of information every day. Chronosphere’s platform handles this data more efficiently and at a lower cost, which is why Palo Alto Networks sees it as a good fit.

Palo Alto Networks plans to pair Chronosphere with its AgentiX platform. Palo Alto Networks' AgentiX uses AI agents to detect issues, understand what caused them and then take appropriate action to mitigate the issues. Combining Chronosphere’s data with AgentiX’s automation, Palo Alto Networks hopes to offer faster problem detection and quicker fixes. This is also aimed at helping customers reduce downtime while improving reliability.

Chronosphere currently has more than $160 million in Annual Recurring Revenues and is growing by triple-digits on a year-over-year basis. Palo Alto Networks expects the business to stay mostly independent at first, but will use its large sales network to introduce Chronosphere to more enterprise customers.

The deal helps Palo Alto Networks enter the observability market, which is becoming more important as companies rely more on AI and cloud systems. The company's growth prospects depend on whether it can grow Chronosphere further and make observability a solid contributor to future revenues.

How Do Competitors Fare Against PANW?

CrowdStrike (CRWD) and Okta Inc. (OKTA) are key players competing with Palo Alto Networks, which are also focusing on acquisitions for platform expansion and AI innovation.

In September 2025, CrowdStrike signed a definitive agreement to acquire Pangea, a company that builds tools to help security teams in securing AI from cloud to code. Through the Pangea acquisition, CrowdStrike aims to launch AI Detection and Response, granting the company the necessary tools required for complete protection of the entire AI lifecycle.

Okta completed its acquisition of Axiom Security in September 2025. Through this acquisition, Okta has added new tools for privileged access management, helping customers control who can reach sensitive cloud, SaaS and database systems.

PANW’s Price Performance, Valuation & Estimates

Shares of Palo Alto Networks have declined 2.6% year to date compared to the Zacks Security industry’s growth of 9.1%.

PANW YTD Price Return Performance

From a valuation standpoint, Palo Alto Networks trades at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 12.06 compared with the industry’s average of 12.18.

PANW Forward 12-Month P/S Ratio

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for Palo Alto Networks’ fiscal 2026 and 2027 earnings implies year-over-year growth of 14.7% and 12.6%, respectively. Estimates for fiscal 2026 and 2027 have been revised upward by 4 cents and 2 cents, respectively, over the past 30 days.

Palo Alto Networks currently carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell).

You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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