Cisco Announces Acquisition of Galileo for Enhanced AI Observability
Cisco has officially announced its intention to acquire Galileo Technologies, a leader in AI observability solutions. This strategic move aims to bolster Cisco's Splunk observability portfolio, enhancing the visibility and protection of AI agents throughout their development lifecycle.
Galileo's platform is recognized for providing real-time observability and essential guardrails for developing multi-agent systems. It has become an industry standard for establishing trust in AI agents, as stated by Kamal Hathi, Cisco’s Senior Vice President and General Manager for the Splunk business unit.
“Galileo was purpose-built to solve one of the hardest and most consequential problems in AI: Trust. From day one, its platform has equipped AI teams with the necessary tools to evaluate AI quality, preempt failures before reaching users, and continuously enhance AI behavior in production settings,” Hathi emphasized in a recent blog post regarding the acquisition.
This acquisition is expected to strengthen Cisco’s capabilities in AI agent monitoring, providing enhanced real-time visibility and protection. Hathi elaborated, “Beyond this, Galileo offers teams a unified platform to instrument every stage of the agent development lifecycle with the rigor that enterprises require. It is a comprehensive solution that delivers deeper insights from the initial stages of prompt optimization and model selection through evaluations to production monitoring, observability, and enforcing guardrails.”
Cisco and Galileo have collaborated in the past, forming a consortium called AGNTCY, which focuses on security and observability capabilities. This consortium aims to define specifications and reference implementations for an open-source architecture that addresses the requirements for building a trustworthy AI ecosystem across various environments.
In light of the increasing prevalence of AI agents, Cisco is committed to safeguarding its enterprise customers against potential security issues. At the recent RSAC 2026, Cisco unveiled a suite of products designed to tackle AI security challenges. Among these is the Duo Agentic Identity package, which assists enterprises in discovering, identifying, and monitoring AI agents, ensuring they access only essential resources. Additionally, Cisco plans to enhance its AI Defense platform to provide further protection against agentic AI threats.
Peter Bailey, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s security business, stated, “We have this opportunity to be a trust layer, not just for network activity, but also for what occurs at the application layer, workload layer, between agents, between workloads, and between data.” He highlighted Cisco's long-standing commitment to providing trust anchors and boundaries, extending these principles into the realm of agents and workloads.
Galileo has also expressed its intention to contribute its Agent Control framework to the open-source community, establishing a new standard for governing agent behavior. This framework was released under the Apache 2.0 license, which highlights Galileo’s commitment to open-source collaboration.
As AI technology evolves, it introduces new complexities. Hathi noted, “The behavior of agentic applications can result in unexpected, inaccurate, low-quality, or harmful outputs. Such issues can ultimately lead to decreased customer trust, poor end-user experiences, and increased operational costs.” He emphasized the importance of observability, stating that teams need visibility across the entire AI stack, beyond just latency and error signals. “Observability must include evaluations of issues like hallucinations and bias, as well as security metrics to detect and mitigate business risks, and track costs to ensure a clear return on investment,” he added.
“Galileo will assist us in achieving this goal, expanding Cisco’s extensive AI engineering talent to set the benchmark for AI agent evaluation,” Hathi concluded.
The acquisition is projected to finalize in the fourth quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2026, marking a significant step in enhancing the capabilities of AI observability within enterprise environments.
Source: Network World News