Cisco buys Galileo
Cisco announced it is acquiring Galileo to fold AI‑observability tools into its Splunk observability stack so enterprises can monitor agent behaviour as closely as they do networks. The move reflects a new reality where observability, model evaluation and security converge once AI systems act autonomously, and Cisco says Galileo will strengthen real‑time monitoring and trust capabilities inside Splunk ( ).
Cisco is buying a company that watches what artificial intelligence agents actually do after you turn them loose inside a business, not just whether the server stayed up. Cisco said on April 9, 2026 that it intends to acquire Galileo Technologies and fold it into the Splunk observability business it bought in 2024. (blogs.cisco.com) That sounds niche until you picture a software agent with permission to read tickets, call tools, and send messages on its own. A normal monitoring dashboard can tell you the machine was running, but it cannot tell you whether the agent picked the wrong tool, invented an answer, or exposed sensitive data. (galileo.ai) Galileo was built for that second problem. Its platform says it can evaluate, monitor, and protect generative artificial intelligence applications and agents in production, with products named Observe, Evaluate, and Protect. (galileo.ai, galileo.ai) Cisco already had the first half of the picture through Splunk. Splunk is the software many large companies use to collect logs, traces, and alerts from networks, apps, and security systems, and Cisco says Galileo will extend that into the full agent development lifecycle. (blogs.cisco.com, networkworld.com) The reason this deal is happening now is that companies are moving from chatbots that answer one question at a time to agents that take multi-step actions. Cisco’s Splunk chief Kamal Hathi said Galileo will “supercharge” Splunk’s current artificial intelligence agent monitoring so customers get real-time visibility and protection across those workflows. (blogs.cisco.com, crn.com) That changes what “observability” means. In older software, engineers mainly asked whether a request was slow or a database was down; in agent software, they also have to ask whether the model drifted, hallucinated, or made a bad decision while all the infrastructure looked healthy. (galileo.ai, galileo.ai) Galileo has been selling itself as a way to turn offline testing into live guardrails. Its documentation says teams can monitor live traffic, identify vulnerabilities, capture expert feedback, and use evaluation signals to stop failures before they reach users. (docs.galileo.ai, galileo.ai) Cisco is effectively betting that the line between operations software and security software is disappearing. If an agent can choose tools and touch company data, then reliability, safety, and compliance become the same monitoring problem seen from three angles. (blogs.cisco.com, siliconangle.com) That also helps explain why Cisco, a company once known mainly for routers and switches, keeps pushing deeper into software. The Splunk acquisition gave it a giant installed base in enterprise monitoring, and Galileo gives that stack a way to inspect artificial intelligence behavior instead of only network behavior. (blogs.cisco.com, techzine.eu) The deal is still at the intent stage, not closed. Cisco said Galileo’s team and products will strengthen Splunk Observability Cloud, and outside reports say the acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2026, with both companies operating independently until then. (blogs.cisco.com, briefly.co)
