Cisco to acquire Galileo for AI observability

Cisco today announced plans to acquire AI observability firm Galileo Technologies.

Galileo’s platform provides real-time observability and guardrails for the development of multi-agent systems and has been adopted across the enterprise as the industry standard for instilling trust in AI agents, according to Kamal Hathi, senior vice president and general manager for Cisco’s Splunk business unit.

“Galileo was purpose-built to solve one of the hardest and most consequential problems in AI: Trust. From day 1, its platform has given AI teams the tools to evaluate AI quality, detect AI failures before they reach users, and continuously improve AI behavior in production – turning observability from a nice-to-have into a core pillar of AI development,” Hathi wrote in a blog post about the acquisition.

The technology will strengthen Cisco’s Splunk observability portfolio and bring improved AI agent monitoring capabilities, real-time visibility, and protection to the agent development lifecycle (ADLC), he said. “Beyond this, Galileo gives teams a single platform to instrument every stage of the ADLC with the rigor that enterprises demand. It is a complete solution that enables deeper insights from the earliest stages of prompt optimization and model selection, through evaluations, all the way to production monitoring, observability and enforcing guardrails,” Hathi wrote.

Cisco and Galileo have worked together in the past. A year ago, Cisco announced a consortium called AGNTCY that it launched in partnership with Galileo for its security and observability capabilities and LangChain for its agent orchestration technology. AGNTCY plans to define specifications and reference implementations for an open-source architecture that tackles the requirements for building a trustworthy AI ecosystem across diverse environments.

Cisco has gone all-in on protecting enterprise customers from an onslaught of AI agents and the security problems they may present. Last month at RSAC 2026, it announced a variety of products to handle AI security issues. Cisco’s Duo Agentic Identity package, for example, is aimed at helping enterprises discover, identify and monitor AI agents and make sure they are accessing only needed resources. Cisco also said it would expand the role of its AI Defense platform for agentic AI protections.

“We have this opportunity to be a trust layer, not just for … network activity, but actually what’s happening at the application layer, at the workload layer, between agents, between workloads, between data,” Peter Bailey, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s security business, told Network World last month. “Cisco has long offered that trust layer, having trust anchors and trust boundaries and other technologies, so we’re really extending that into the world of agents and workloads.”

For its part, Galileo recently said it would contribute its Agent Control framework to the open-source community. Agent Control is a control plane that establishes a new standard for governing agent behavior. It was released under the Apache 2.0 license.

The democratization of AI brings new complexities, Hathi stated. “The behavior of agentic applications can lead to unexpected, inaccurate, low quality, or harmful outputs. These issues can ultimately lead to decreased customer trust, poor end-user experiences, and increased costs,” he wrote. “As a result, teams need visibility across the AI stack beyond signals like latency and errors. Observability must evaluate issues like hallucinations and bias, security metrics to detect, mitigate business risks, and track cost and usage metrics to ensure clear ROI.”

“Galileo will help us do just this, expanding Cisco’s deep bench of AI engineering talent to set the standard for AI agent evaluation,” Hathi wrote.

The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Cisco’s 2026 fiscal year.