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.
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