Broadcom has unveiled the WatchTower Platform, an innovative observability solution designed to enhance business performance by streamlining incident identification and resolution within the mainframe environment.
This platform improves visibility across IT silos by integrating events, data flows, signals, and key metrics, enabling operations teams to coordinate workflows more efficiently and enhance alerts with relevant context, Broadcom said.
WatchTower leverages existing mainframe AIOps solutions while enhancing the visibility of mainframe telemetry in enterprise observability tools. By integrating operational tools, workflows, data, and machine learning insights from various sources into a unified experience, WatchTower can detect potential problems at an early stage, allowing organizations to address issues proactively.
Greg Lotko, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom’s Mainframe Software Division, highlighted the significance of WatchTower in addressing the challenges faced by IT teams inundated with vast amounts of data. He emphasized that improved visibility into application resource performance end-to-end provides a significant advantage to teams striving to enhance monitoring and problem resolution efficiency.
Mohesh Punjabi, Executive Director at Morgan Stanley, emphasized the proactive nature of WatchTower, stating that early detection of brewing problems empowers organizations to transition from reactive recovery to proactive avoidance.
WatchTower integrates with OpenTelemetry, an open observability framework, to stream key insights and mainframe performance telemetry to distributed application traces in observability tools like Datadog, Grafana, New Relic, Splunk, and Jaeger. This extension of view into request workflows and interactions with mainframe services allows analysts to identify bottlenecks and their impact on the end-user experience in real-time.
Cory Minton, Field CTO at Splunk, hailed the availability of mainframe telemetry in this open observability framework as a significant advancement. He noted that organizations can now fully observe the end-to-end structure of applications across their hybrid cloud, facilitating quicker identification of root causes of errors and performance issues.
WatchTower includes support for enterprise integration through open APIs, currently utilized by products such as Broadcom’s DX Application Performance Management (DX APM).
