March 4, 2024

To:          Broadcom Mainframe Software Customers

From:      Broadcom’s Mainframe Solutions Team

Subject:  General Availability Announcement for WatchTower Platform™ Suite 1.0

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 that WatchTower Platform™ 1.0 Suite (“WatchTower”) is now available.

WatchTower is an open observability solution that improves business performance by streamlining identification and resolution of high-priority incidents in the mainframe environment. You can learn more about WatchTower by viewing the WatchTower Roadmap webinar.

How WatchTower Assists with Mainframe Operations:

• 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, transformg operations from reactive recovery to proactive avoidance and seamlessly integrates new capabilities with established AIOps solutions.
• Detecting Patterns and Avoiding Issues – Leveraging millions of historical change events, logs, metrics, and workload trends across environments, and application components, WatchTower employs embedded ML algorithms specifically trained for the mainframe to analyze data for performance patterns, identify anomalies requiring attention, and generate insights that inform and guide corrective action.
• Cross-Correlating and Integrating Information – WatchTower brings clarity and efficiency to analyze data from across your IT operations and overcomes the barrier of silos by integrating resources and intelligence across the enterprise to deliver insightful analytics.
• Facilitating Collaboration Across Diverse Domains and Skill Levels with Contextual Insights – By enabling operations team members at all levels, WatchTower promotes a collaborative approach within support and operations teams, enabling Ops staff with diverse skill levels to use a common toolset so that, when issues arise, they can swiftly progress from alert to resolution.
• Making Enterprise Observability Mainframe Inclusive - WatchTower leverages OpenTelemetry, an open observability framework, to stream key insights and mainframe performance telemetry enterprise observability tools thereby correlation mainframe application traces to distributed application traces to provide analysts with real-time information to identify bottlenecks and their impact on the end-customer experience.

What You Get with WatchTower:

WatchTower is designed to be your one stop shop for mainframe operations with added analytics to provide a deeper understanding of multiple aspects of mainframe ops to lead to quick problem resolution, and ideally, issue avoidance using machine learning and A.I. technologies. It consists of Capabilities which leverage data to provide operational awareness, and Core Solutions, which provide management and problem resolution.

Included Capabilities:

• Topology – maps auto-discovered hardware and software assets within your mainframe operations, as well as their related resources and dependencies, from an application perspective.
• Alert Insights – provides a centralized interface for alerts across your mainframe domains, designed to provide required context of which alerts may be related to each other as well as which resources may be relevant.
• Machine Learning Insights – enables anomaly detection of key metrics to determine issues before they become outages.
• z/IRIS Real Time Streaming – allows mainframe data to be easily shared with cloud and distributed systems for end-to-end analysis that also enables tracing.

Included Core Solutions:
(with entitlements for these solutions and integrations with Included Capabilities)

• SYSVIEW (with zAB) – system performance monitoring and management
• OPS/MVS (with Automation Point) – premier mainframe automation system with automation integrations with Machine Learning Insight
• NetMaster – network monitoring and management for mainframes
• Vantage – storage monitoring, management, and automation
• Dynamic Capacity Intelligence – near real-time management of workloads to optimize capacity
• Mainframe Application Tuner – analysis of application performance to streamline application resource consumption

We have included a Solution Brief that details the features and highlights of this release.

We also encourage you to visit the WatchTower product information page at Tech Docs as well as the WatchTower solution website.

You can download your copy of WatchTower 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 Community.

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.

Thank you again for your business.