Mainframe Blog

Empower Your IT Teams with a Smarter Observability Solution | Broadcom

Written by Greg Lotko | Feb 29, 2024 4:00:00 PM

Introducing the WatchTower Platform™ – a mainframe observability solution that empowers enterprise customers to transition mainframe operations from reactive recovery to proactive avoidance while enhancing the visibility of mainframes in enterprise observability tools.

Addressing a Critical Need

Our customers have made it clear that their IT teams are drowning in a flood of data that continues to rise at a dramatic rate. This makes it challenging for those teams to find and react to the critical insights that could impact business operations. The WatchTower Platform was designed in close partnership with our customers to ensure it solves this and other pressing challenges.

Detecting Patterns and Avoiding Issues

Clearly, the most desirable issue is one that never occurs. Second best is one that has no opportunity to escalate. At Broadcom, we use embedded ML algorithms specifically trained for the mainframe to analyze data for performance patterns, identify anomalies requiring attention, and generate insights that your team can use to take corrective action. WatchTower includes, and improves on, these capabilities.

The new solution scours millions of historical change events, logs, metrics, and workload trends across environments and application components to give organizations better visibility into how their application resources are performing end-to-end. That’s a huge advantage for teams that are constantly pressed to make their monitoring and problem resolution more efficient.

Cross-Correlating and Integrating Information

Traditional processes for identifying and resolving mainframe problems rely on standalone operational tools, dissociated workflows, and uncoordinated data from diverse sources. WatchTower brings clarity and efficiency to this paradigm and overcomes the barrier of silos in ways that will delight IT teams. To begin with, it integrates resources and intelligence across the enterprise, eliminating the need for multiple tool logins. And it goes further by enhancing alerts with pertinent context. The results are greater predictive analytics and expedited identification and resolution of problems.

Facilitating Collaboration across Diverse Domains and Skill Levels

The WatchTower Platform enables operations staff of all skill levels, even those new to the mainframe, to manage alerts and resolve issues efficiently. Organizations can tailor the WatchTower user experience to the unique needs of various roles, including Level 1 and Level 2 support staff and domain specialists. This promotes a collaborative approach within support and operations teams, enabling Ops staff with diverse skill levels to use a common toolset so, when issues arise, they can swiftly progress from alert to resolution.

Making Enterprise Observability Mainframe Inclusive

In hybrid IT environments, where business applications interact with various platforms, it’s crucial to uncover hidden relationships across IT silos and achieve comprehensive observability throughout your systems. Unfortunately, industry-leading observability tools often lack visibility into the segment of an application running on mainframes. This gap makes it difficult to perform a truly comprehensive analysis of how your business services are performing.

WatchTower’s OpenTelemetry streaming enables you to integrate your mainframes into enterprise observability tools seamlessly. This integration ensures that analysts have access to real-time information, so they can identify bottlenecks and assess their impact on the end-user experience.

Elevate Mainframe Problem Identification and Resolution

By blending the power of machine and human intelligence, WatchTower empowers your IT Ops teams to align mainframe operations with business performance in powerful new ways that give organizations the ability to see the measurable impact mainframes have on their overall business results.

As a plus, WatchTower delivers its efficiency and performance gains through innovative capabilities that are integrated into familiar AIOps solutions you already use. In fact, if you’re licensed to SYSVIEW®, OPS/MVS®, NetMaster®, or Vantage®, you can readily harness WatchTower’s new capabilities at no additional cost today!

 

Ready to get started? Click here for more information.