Broadcom Debuts Groundbreaking WatchTower Platform for Mainframe Observability

PALO ALTO, Calif., March 05, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ:AVGO) announced today the availability of the WatchTower Platform^™, an innovative, 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.”

A Broadcom customer puts the value WatchTower represents in perspective. “If we can detect that a problem is brewing, much quicker, in the early warning system, automation and other technologies can react and make decisions,” said Mohesh Punjabi, executive director, Morgan Stanley. “As a result, organizations are empowered to transition their mainframe operations from reactive recovery to proactive avoidance.”

Making Enterprise Observability Mainframe Inclusive

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.

“The availability of mainframe telemetry in this open observability framework is a huge step forward,” said Cory Minton, field CTO, Splunk. “Now, organizations can fully observe the end-to-end structure of applications across their entire hybrid cloud, giving them a fantastic window into their overall health. As a result, not only can organizations identify root cause of errors and performance issues much faster, it’s now possible to determine the effect they have on the processing of business transactions.”

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.

For more information on Broadcom’s WatchTower Platform click here.

About Broadcom
Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO) is a global technology leader that designs, develops, and supplies a broad range of semiconductor, enterprise software and security solutions. Broadcom's category-leading product portfolio serves critical markets including cloud, data center, networking, broadband, wireless, storage, industrial, and enterprise software. Our solutions include service provider and enterprise networking and storage, mobile device and broadband connectivity, mainframe, cybersecurity, and private and hybrid cloud infrastructure. Broadcom is a Delaware corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, CA. For more information, go to www.broadcom.com.

Broadcom, the pulse logo, Connecting Everything are among the trademarks of Broadcom.  The term "Broadcom" refers to Broadcom Inc., and/or its subsidiaries. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Press Contact:
Jon Piazza
Global Communications
press.relations@broadcom.com
Telephone: +1 310 498 5254