Palo Alto Networks introduced a new approach to AI-driven observability last week, signaling a shift from dashboards and manual incident response toward AI agents that investigate issues and recommend fixes on their own.

Cortex XCOR is an AI-driven platform designed to deliver the holy grail of observability: automatically root-causing issues and recommending fixes, rather than simply pointing technical operatives to dashboards.

The company has said the foundational scale and cost challenges of cloud-native architectures stood in the way of this happening before now, and pre-AI-boom automation was sluggish. Palo Alto Networks acquired cloud-native observability platform and telemetry pipeline company Chronosphere in January to develop real-time agentic remediation in this vein.

Built by the Chronosphere team inside Palo Alto Networks, Cortex XCOR is designed to transform observability from static dashboards and manual remediation to an AI-first experience that automates both routine and complex investigations.

SVP and GM of observability at Palo Alto Networks, Martin Mao, tells The New Stack that when an alert fires, Cortex XCOR automatically triggers a specialized agent that autonomously reasons through underlying issues and recommends actions and mitigations. 

“We don’t want to keep waking engineers up in the middle of the night to help them make sense of dashboards; to be clear… we don’t want to wake them up at all,” Mao says. “While XCOR defaults to a human-in-the-loop model, engineering leaders can expand its autonomous permissions over time and finally get a full night’s sleep.”

“We don’t want to keep waking engineers up in the middle of the night to help them make sense of dashboards; to be clear… we don’t want to wake them up at all.”

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