The WatchTower Platform Suite is a modern mainframe observability solution designed to make navigating vast amounts of information intuitive and efficient. In an environment where information overload is a constant challenge, WatchTower simplifies problem detection and resolution by seamlessly integrating operational tools, workflows, and data from multiple sources. By leveraging AI and machine learning, Watchtower cuts through complexity and noise, allowing teams to focus on what matters the most.
The key business value of the WatchTower platform lies in its ability to transition organizations from reactive recovery to proactive avoidance of issues. By detecting potential problems early through pattern recognition and predictive analytics, teams can address minor issues before they escalate into significant operational disruptions. This proactive approach significantly reduces downtime risks and ensures continuous business.
WatchTower sets itself apart from traditional mainframe solutions by focusing on next-generation mainframers. Built from the ground up for flexibility and ease of use, it features an intuitive interface, extensive customization options, and streamlined workflows. Users gain a clear, tailored view of alerts, metrics, inter-component relationships, and other key insights, ensuring that they have the right information at their fingertips.
However, despite its powerful capabilities, integrating WatchTower into existing enterprise environments can be somewhat challenging due to the variety of supported tools, multiple data sources, and the diversity of user roles. Effective documentation addresses this challenge by simplifying technical complexity into accessible concepts, enabling organizations to confidently integrate WatchTower into their production environments.
Bridging the Technological Gap
The WatchTower Platform Suite stands out as a unified solution that spans Kubernetes and z/OS environments, each presenting its unique challenges. The Kubernetes environment requires configuring and securing containerized workloads, managing sensitive secrets, and optimizing storage and data throughput, while z/OS environments demand rigorous protocols to safeguard mainframe communications and integrate legacy systems with modern architectures. Bridging these two domains requires not only technical innovation but also a well-structured approach to documenting installation procedures, configuration steps, and best practices.
To address these challenges, the documentation recommends assembling a team of experts, including cloud engineers, systems developers, and security administrators. A reference table at the beginning of each installation and configuration section outlines the required roles, allowing each persona to focus on tasks that align with their expertise. This role-based segmentation streamlines team responsibility management, fosters smoother collaboration, and minimizes the risk of misalignment.
In addition to personas and roles, the documentation provides installation and upgrade checklists, which outline high-level tasks for each role. These checklists are further supported by workflow diagrams that illustrate the deployment process across Kubernetes and z/OS domains. By visually mapping the deployment and configuration path, these diagrams assist teams in navigating the complexities of these two distinct environments.
Further clarity is achieved through the use of simplified diagrams that represent the various layers of the platform in isolation. By abstracting complex interconnections and components into functional blocks, these visual aids provide valuable insights into different aspects of the WatchTower Platform, enabling clear explanation and understanding of each layer.
Finally, configuration procedures are accompanied by practical examples where applicable.These examples demonstrate the configuration concepts in practice and can serve as references or starting points for creating custom configurations.
Relying on a role-based approach, structured task lists, abstracted diagrams, and domain-specific workflows, the documentation ensures that even the most complex integration and deployment tasks can be easily managed.
Efficient Onboarding
Every mainframe environment is tailored and optimized to meet the specific needs of an organization. This diversity makes implementing a cross-domain unifying platform like WatchTower somewhat challenging. To overcome this challenge, the documentation introduces the “green path,” the default installation route that follows Broadcom’s well-established Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE) principles to support the most typical environments and use cases. This approach guides teams through a structured workflow, leveraging ready-made scripts and detailed procedures with examples to streamline preparation and deployment tasks.
We have not overlooked more demanding and specialized users; the documentation highlights all optional steps, allowing deviations from the "green path" when necessary. The utility scripts provide flexible options, enabling automation for highly specific use cases. Insights from early adopters and Broadcom’s close partners have helped incorporate many of these specialized requirements into the utility scripts, enabling customers to address more complex tasks with ease, such as those handled by the Certificate Manager utility.
Continuous Improvement and Delivery of the Documentation
The CI/CD practices, widely recognized in the software development domain, are also applied to documentation. Besides the software developers, the support team can actively contribute to enhancing the documentation by reporting challenges that customers may encounter when installing the WatchTower Platform in their custom environments. Support engineers are able to report such cases and propose improvements to the content through mechanisms integrated directly into the documentation development tool.
Your Opinion Matters
Our team of technical writers is dedicated to creating documentation that is both clear and comprehensive, covering every aspect of the product, from installation and configuration to upgrading and administration. Your feedback is invaluable to us. Please don't hesitate to share your thoughts, and we will incorporate them into our ongoing efforts to enhance and refine our documentation. Let us know in the comments!