Building Incremental Observability with Broadcom’s WatchTower Platform

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.