October 2024

To:           Broadcom Mainframe Software Customers

From:      Broadcom’s Mainframe Solutions Team

Subject:   General Availability Announcement for WatchTower Platform™ Suite 1.1

On behalf of Broadcom, we appreciate your business and the opportunity to provide you with high-quality, innovative software and services.  As part of our ongoing commitment to customer success, we regularly release updated versions of our products.  Today, we are pleased to announce the release of WatchTower Platform™ Suite 1.1.

Customers licensed for SYSVIEW, OPS/MVS, NetMaster and Vantage are entitled to the WatchTower Platform, which includes these following new features:

WatchTower Dashboards *New*

Empower users to focus on the applicable information they want to see, to track mainframe performance. Users will be able to quickly develop insights into the performance of their mainframe environment.  Sample dashboards are provided for LPAR, CICS, MQ and Network problem diagnostics.

Additional guidelines are available in the WatchTower Dashboard documentation.

WatchTower Alert Insights

• Advanced Filtering

Group filter criteria into logical statements, which users may create and save as custom filters, or deploy as tabs for a highly focused alert view.

• Expanded Alert Statuses

The alert statuses have been expanded to enable more granular classification of alert conclusions, allowing users to quickly identify alerts of interest, leading to faster time-to-resolution.

• Mainframe Application Tuner (MAT) Integration

Integration with MAT allows the capture of critical MAT and Performance Management Assistant (PMA) data to facilitate performance monitoring.

Additional guidelines are available in the WatchTower Alert Insights documentation.

WatchTower ML Insights

• View ML Highways with Dashboards

View metric activity, including anomalous behavior, with the new Dashboards capability. Dashboards and ML Highways work hand-in-hand to graphically depict metric trends,with an aim to make it easier to spot them early and address issues before they can negatively impact system performance.

• New NetMaster and SYSVIEW Metrics

Many additional NetMaster and SYSVIEW metrics.

Additional guidelines are available in the WatchTower ML Insights documentation.

WatchTower Topology 1.2.4

• IMS Connections
  WatchTower Topology is now extended with IMS Connections to DB2 and MQ. It is able to discover connections between PSB and DB2 Package or MQ Queue respectively.

IMS Connections inferred from respective SMF data for Db2 & MQ to enrich the Topology map and Relationship Explorer capabilities, supporting new levels of infrastructure understanding, without requiring new configuration or data processing.

• Alert HotSpots Improvements
  WatchTower Topology is now able to produce Alert Hotspots more rapidly, regardless of the size of the Topology shown. This illustrates which resources and systems may be experiencing issues more rapidly and it is built upon the newly available Alert Aggregation API in WatchTower 1.1.

The resulting Alerts view may be opened in the same or a new browser tab.

Please note that WatchTower 1.1 requires WatchTower Topology 1.2.4 or greater for full and supported integration.

Additional guidelines are available in the WatchTower Topology documentation.

WatchTower Real-Time Streaming (z/IRIS)  1.2.0

• High Availability
  With this release customers can deploy multiple z/IRIS IronTap nodes as a cluster across sites to achieve enhanced mainframe observability. Should a site or a node fail, the remaining nodes are able to continue processing the SMF records and send OpenTelemetry (OTel) traces, metrics and logs.

• CICS Exception Visibility
  With the availability of the OpenTelemetry Logs Signal, WatchTower z/IRIS can provide the CICS Exception information and maintain the ability to correlate the exception to the CICS transaction and business application request that was affected.

Additional guidelines are available in the WatchTower Real-Time Streaming (z/IRIS) documentation.

We encourage you to visit the WatchTower Platform™ Suite product information page at Support and Tech Docs, where you can find information about all WatchTower Capabilities: Alert Insights, ML Insights, Topology, Real-Time Streaming (zIRIS) and Application Profiler.

You can download your copy of WatchTower Platform™ Suite 1.1and all relevant capabilities online at Support where you can also utilize the case management system. To install your product, follow the installation procedures for your product at Tech Docs.  If you have any questions or require assistance, contact Support.

Should you need any assistance in understanding these new features, or implementing this latest release, our implementation services partners can help.  Please contact your local account representative for more information on how they can help. To connect, learn, and share with other customers, join and participate in our WatchTower Platform™ Suite Community at https://community.broadcom.com/communities/communityhomeblogs?CommunityKey=f65e0957-5466-40ac-b480-018c6975a8da

For a list of Mainframe Education courses recommended by role, please visit the Learning Paths and select the desired product. We update courses based on functional impact as well as high-demand; therefore, courses created from previous releases may apply to the current release.

Please review our End of Service / End of Life Policy at Broadcom Maintenance Policy Handbook.

Thank you again for your business.