Broadcom Presents at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Cleveland 2025

Building Incremental Observability with Broadcom’s WatchTower Platform

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Broadcom’s WatchTower Platform™ is an observability platform designed to provide a unified view of mainframe and distributed systems. This platform empowers users to identify and resolve issues more swiftly. It seamlessly integrates data from diverse sources into a single interface, leveraging capabilities such as alerting, machine learning, application profiling, and real-time streaming. These features enable enhanced troubleshooting, performance optimization, and overall operational efficiency.

In their presentation at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Cleveland 2025, Broadcom showcased how they are building on their longstanding mainframe tools by layering the WatchTower observability platform over them to streamline diagnostics and integrate across the enterprise. The goal is to relieve operators and subject matter experts from navigating disparate systems by centralizing data for problem detection and resolution. The platform caters to both traditional mainframe operators and modern Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), enabling end-to-end visibility from applications through to mainframe systems, and integrates with popular observability tools like Datadog and Splunk.

WatchTower expands on legacy products such as SysView, NetMaster, OpsMVS, and MAT, offering new capabilities like data streaming, data visualization, role-based access, and topology mapping. These innovations allow for automated correlation of events, targeted alerting with contextual insight, and easier collaboration between SREs and performance analysts. Importantly, these enhancements are available without additional licensing for customers already using Broadcom’s core products. Broadcom emphasizes incremental value by progressively adding toolsets that improve real-time observability and reduce mean time to resolution, while still allowing experts to dive into native interfaces for deeper analysis when needed.

Personnel: Michael Kiehl

Expanding Value with Broadcom WatchTower’s Metric Analysis

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At Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Cleveland 2025, Broadcom presented their advancements in mainframe observability through the WatchTower platform, an evolution designed to improve how performance and optimization data is collected, correlated, and acted upon. The core problem addressed is that traditional domain-specific monitoring tools, like SysView for CICS or NetMaster for networks, operate in functional silos, leading to inefficiencies when diagnosing cross-domain performance issues. WatchTower eliminates this obstacle by aggregating and contextualizing alert data across different mainframe subsystems. As a result, users gain broader visibility through Alert and Contextual Insights—a holistic view that improves incident resolution speed and accuracy while making it easier to distinguish between isolated and system-wide failures.

One of the hallmark features of WatchTower is its intelligent dashboards, which provide both real-time and historical views across previously siloed data domains. These dashboards tap directly into established data collectors from key Broadcom tools such as Vantage, SysView, and NetMaster, ensuring that users can visualize telemetry data from CICS, DB2, MQ, IMS, and network components in one cohesive interface. The dashboards emphasize usability, allowing users to create custom views without writing complex queries. This flexibility accommodates both infrastructure-centric roles, like a CICS administrator, and higher-level application-focused personas. Complementing this visual capability is embedded machine learning (ML), which not only detects anomalies but tracks gradual performance degradations—informing users of potential issues before service level agreements (SLAs) are breached.

Broadcom’s ML Insights extends the usefulness of WatchTower by delivering proactive anomaly detection built on each organization’s unique dataset, rather than relying on static or generic thresholds. This approach tailors models dynamically based on ongoing operations, learning from historical patterns and adjusting its behavior to recognize events like seasonal peaks or daily load cycles. While immediate automation is not triggered by the platform directly, Broadcom allows integration with OpsMVS for customers who wish to design their own event-based playbooks or remediation rules. Although historical data cannot be retroactively loaded into the system at this time, WatchTower begins modeling from initial deployment onward, allowing it to curate dynamic baselines over time. These ML models, however, currently lack a formal feedback loop, though this capability is under consideration for future updates to further enhance adaptive learning.

Personnel: Machhindra Nale, Tom Quinn

Greater Insights into Application Performance Management with Broadcom WatchTower

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Broadcom’s presentation, delivered by Petr Klomfar at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Cleveland 2025, explored the emerging necessity for sophisticated Application Performance Management (APM) solutions to address modern IT challenges. Titled “Greater Insights into Application Performance Management with Broadcom WatchTower,” the session demonstrated how reduced visibility into mainframe applications, increasing resource costs, and complex modernization efforts are creating new demands for observability, optimization, and operational efficiency. Klomfar introduced Broadcom WatchTower and complementary tools like Application Performance for Z (AP4Z) and Mainframe Application Tuner (MAT), emphasizing their value in providing continuous, scalable, and low-overhead performance data to drive smarter and faster decision-making.

Klomfar began with a historical overview of computing trends, highlighting the shift from early, resource-constrained environments that necessitated deep optimization to an era where increased computing power led to more complacent development practices. However, with today’s economic pressures and pricing models like IBM’s tailor-fit pricing, there’s a renewed emphasis on efficiency. Mainframes now require high levels of visibility and analytical depth to optimize and modernize legacy environments. Klomfar identified challenges such as the “black box” nature of mainframe applications, difficulty in identifying ROI for performance improvements, and the complexity of root cause analysis. To address these, Broadcom’s AP4Z continuously monitors system performance with negligible (often 0.1%) overhead, supporting optimization, modernization planning, and troubleshooting with real-time, context-rich data.

A major focus of the presentation was the synergy between WatchTower and performance tools like AP4Z and MAT. AP4Z provides application profiling that can identify hot spots using Pareto principles, support modernization pathfinding by highlighting application components, and flag anomalies for root cause investigations. Meanwhile, MAT performs deeper, targeted analysis with slightly higher overhead (typically around 3–4%) and feeds into operational workflows via WatchTower alerts. This integrated architecture empowers organizations to decrease mean time to resolution (MTTR), improve SLAs, and make measurable reductions in costs through smarter resource usage. Klomfar concluded by championing the benefits of clear and accessible performance data for diverse roles, from system engineers to developers, affirming Broadcom’s commitment to continual improvement and client collaboration.

Personnel: Petr Klomfar

Bringing the Mainframe to the Whole Enterprise with Broadcom WatchTower

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In this presentation at Tech Field Day Extra at SHARE Cleveland 2025, Angelika Heinrich, Product Manager for Broadcom’s WatchTower real-time streaming capability, discusses the growing imperative for organizations to improve customer satisfaction and operational efficiency through enhanced observability and service reliability. As digital interactions increasingly define customer experiences, enterprises must quickly detect and respond to issues that impact application performance—especially ones involving critical back-end systems like the mainframe. Heinrich emphasizes that WatchTower was developed to align IT visibility with these business needs, enabling technical teams to better understand and respond to end user experiences in real time.

Through the session, Heinrich explains how the traditional siloing of mainframe systems poses challenges in unified observability. While modern DevOps and SRE teams rely on platforms like New Relic, Datadog, and Grafana for monitoring, these tools often lack native support for mainframe environments. WatchTower bridges this gap by streaming mainframe telemetry—encompassing traces, metrics, and logs—in the open telemetry format, a widely adopted standard across observability platforms. This allows SREs, without deep mainframe expertise, to access actionable data insights and correlate performance metrics across distributed and mainframe systems. By doing so, teams can analyze trace-level data, understand latency issues in applications such as KIX transactions, and relate these to environmental conditions or infrastructure constraints.

Heinrich further demonstrates how this unified observability framework empowers operational roles to detect and respond to service degradation more effectively using service level objectives (SLOs). Rather than relying on static thresholds, SLOs allow enterprises to evaluate “good” versus “bad” events through dynamic measurement of user experiences. With WatchTower, contextualized insights—including detailed trace information, correlated logs, and relevant error documentation—all become readily accessible within mainstream observability tools. This not only facilitates faster root cause analysis by SREs but also enables mainframe SMEs to prioritize their efforts on platform innovation rather than acting solely as data interpreters. Ultimately, Broadcom’s WatchTower creates a modern, integrated approach to mainframe observability, democratizing access to critical insights across the entire enterprise.

Personnel: Angelika Heinrich