Greater Insights into Application Performance Management with Broadcom WatchTower

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.