Broadcom Introduces WatchTower Platform for Mainframe Observability
March 05, 2024
Share this

Broadcom announced the availability of the WatchTower Platform™, an open observability solution that improves business performance by streamlining identification and resolution of high-priority incidents in the mainframe environment.

WatchTower enhances visibility across IT silos by integrating and correlating events, data flows, signals, and key metrics. This enables operations teams to rationalize and coordinate workflows with far greater efficiency. It also enhances alerts with pertinent context, allowing teams to improve the signal-to-noise ratio so they can zero in on those alerts most critical to ensuring continuous business operations.

To ease implementation, WatchTower builds upon the foundation of already-popular mainframe AIOps solutions while enhancing the visibility of mainframe telemetry in enterprise observability tools. It integrates operational tools, workflows, data, and machine learning insights from sources across the enterprise into a unified, user-friendly experience catering to a range of skill levels. By doing so, WatchTower can detect patterns that may indicate actual or potential problems at an early stage. This frees organizations to address minor issues before they have a chance to impact operations.

“IT teams today are drowning in a flood of data that continues to grow at a truly staggering rate. This makes it challenging to find and react to the critical insights that could impact their business operations,” said Greg Lotko, senior vice president and general manager, Mainframe Software Division, Broadcom. “WatchTower tackles this challenge head on by giving organizations better visibility into how application resources are performing end-to-end. That improved awareness is a huge advantage for those teams who are constantly pressed to make their monitoring and problem resolution more efficient.”

WatchTower also leverages OpenTelemetry, an open observability framework, to stream key insights and mainframe performance telemetry to distributed application traces in observability tools, such as Datadog, Grafana, New Relic, Splunk, and Jaeger. This extends the view of a request’s workflow, makes interactions with mainframe services visible, and ensures that analysts have real-time information to identify bottlenecks and the impact they have on the end-user experience.

WatchTower also includes existing support for enterprise integration through open APIs, currently used by products such as Broadcom’s DX Application Performance Management (DX APM).

The WatchTower Platform Suite seamlessly integrates new capabilities with established AIOps solutions based on SYSVIEW®, OPS/MVS®, NetMaster®, and Vantage™. Existing customers of these solutions can immediately harness WatchTower’s new capabilities at no additional cost.

Share this

The Latest

November 21, 2024

Broad proliferation of cloud infrastructure combined with continued support for remote workers is driving increased complexity and visibility challenges for network operations teams, according to new research conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Broadcom ...

November 20, 2024

New research from ServiceNow and ThoughtLab reveals that less than 30% of banks feel their transformation efforts are meeting evolving customer digital needs. Additionally, 52% say they must revamp their strategy to counter competition from outside the sector. Adapting to these challenges isn't just about staying competitive — it's about staying in business ...

November 19, 2024

Leaders in the financial services sector are bullish on AI, with 95% of business and IT decision makers saying that AI is a top C-Suite priority, and 96% of respondents believing it provides their business a competitive advantage, according to Riverbed's Global AI and Digital Experience Survey ...

November 18, 2024

SLOs have long been a staple for DevOps teams to monitor the health of their applications and infrastructure ... Now, as digital trends have shifted, more and more teams are looking to adapt this model for the mobile environment. This, however, is not without its challenges ...

November 14, 2024

Modernizing IT infrastructure has become essential for organizations striving to remain competitive. This modernization extends beyond merely upgrading hardware or software; it involves strategically leveraging new technologies like AI and cloud computing to enhance operational efficiency, increase data accessibility, and improve the end-user experience ...

November 13, 2024

AI sure grew fast in popularity, but are AI apps any good? ... If companies are going to keep integrating AI applications into their tech stack at the rate they are, then they need to be aware of AI's limitations. More importantly, they need to evolve their testing regiment ...

November 12, 2024

If you were lucky, you found out about the massive CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage last July by reading about it over coffee. Those less fortunate were awoken hours earlier by frantic calls from work ... Whether you were directly affected or not, there's an important lesson: all organizations should be conducting in-depth reviews of testing and change management ...

November 08, 2024

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 11, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) ...

November 07, 2024

On average, only 48% of digital initiatives enterprise-wide meet or exceed their business outcome targets according to Gartner's annual global survey of CIOs and technology executives ...

November 06, 2024

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping industries around the world. From optimizing business processes to unlocking new levels of innovation, AI is a critical driver of success for modern enterprises. As a result, business leaders — from DevOps engineers to CTOs — are under pressure to incorporate AI into their workflows to stay competitive. But the question isn't whether AI should be adopted — it's how ...