Skip to main content

Broadcom Introduces WatchTower Platform for Mainframe Observability

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.

The Latest

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...

Broadcom Introduces WatchTower Platform for Mainframe Observability

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.

The Latest

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Today, organizations are generating and processing more data than ever before. From training AI models to running complex analytics, massive datasets have become the backbone of innovation. However, as businesses embrace the cloud for its scalability and flexibility, a new challenge arises: managing the soaring costs of storing and processing this data ...