Tech Field Day Session Recap: #3 Broadcom

Innovative observations

I had the recent pleasure of attending the Tech Field Day event at the SHARE conference in Kansas City, expertly hosted by Stephen Foskett. Tech Field Day offers tech companies a ready-made focus group to discuss new innovations and product plans in front of a dedicated panel of experts – and is also live streamed on social media.

One of the highlights of the day was the session hosted by Broadcom, which concentrated on new developments in their observability solution, Watchtower. Here’s a little of what I learned.

Broadcom are no strangers to the mainframe community, of course. With heritage CA staff and technology within their growing ranks, the heritage of understanding and product investment in the Z environment is more than evident. Their latest observability solution release, the aptly-entitled Watchtower – which, as their web site explains, aims at “Enhancing business performance by simplifying the identification and resolution of high-priority incidents” - cements their position as an undoubted leader in mainframe technology.

Built around a core piece of connective tissue that supports core Broadcom products for elements such as performance, storage, networking and systems management, Watchtower leverages the latest in ML and other automation technologies to collate, decipher and then illuminate the state of the nation as the user, in their particular role, wants to consume it.

In fact, to say that Broadcom have undertaken a fastidious review of user personas would be an understatement – their attention to detail in defining the modern era of mainframe operators and their requirements was extremely impressive. The product, understandably, therefore must cover a lot of ground in terms of who it serves and what information it provides. Each of the discrete functions made sense as a subset of the whole of what is effectively a mission control for mainframe operations, and a compelling narrative to support it. So, elements such as capacity management, performance monitoring, problem determination (and avoidance), and application profiles, were cornerstone facilities, offered as tailored instances specific to the needs of subject matter experts, operators and even business or section managers.

It solves the nagging needle-and-haystack problem many mainframe operators used to face – so much data to sift through, but no means of making sense of the noise. The articulate and impressive Nicole Fagan, director of R&D for AIOps and automation at Broadcom, gave a well-prepared outline of the offering, which aims to reduce the time it takes to make sense of what’s going on by consolidating what might otherwise be as many as eight discrete tools or tasks to build the right picture.

As one TechFieldDay panelist exclaimed, “I wish I’d had this product when I was a mainframe operator.”

Another challenge Watchtower seeks to tackle head-on is the crucial aspect of presenting the information in a digestible, accessible manner – again related to the typical methods already employed by the users. As such, Broadcom have taken strides to enable the data feeds to manifest themselves into 3rd enterprise ITSM or Telemetry tooling such as ServiceNow or DataDog. Again, limiting the effort and complexity involved in bringing information to light has been at the nucleus of the product design.

This final capability also tackles a hugely important contemporary challenge for the mainframe: namely ensuring its health and operational status can be reported in the context of the rest of the organization – unifying an enterprise approach to observability that will benefit the whole organization. That nagging concern that the mainframe environment – as powerful and valuable as it is – must connect and integrate more closely with the rest of the organization in today’s hybrid infrastructures, will continue to remain an important aspect of mainframe-centric innovation.

Kudos to Broadcom for shining a light on it in this release.