Bringing the Mainframe to the Whole Enterprise with Broadcom WatchTower

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.