Broadcom
Inc. announced
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 VantageTM. 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.