March 2025
To: Broadcom Mainframe Customers
From: Broadcom's Mainframe Software Customers
Subject: General Availability Announcement for WatchTower Platform™ Suite 1.2
On behalf of Broadcom, we appreciate your business and the opportunity to provide you with high-quality, innovative software and services. As part of our ongoing commitment to customer success, we regularly release updated versions of our products. Today, we are pleased to announce that WatchTower Platform™ Suite 1.2 is now available.
Customers licensed for SYSVIEW, OPS/MVS, NetMaster and Vantage are entitled to the WatchTower Platform, which includes these following new features:
WatchTower Network Insights
A new SME experience, Network Insights, is added for WatchTower 1.2, providing operational real-time views into the security, health, and performance of mainframe networks. Also included is NetMaster's SmartTrace capability for the ability to quickly start, stop, or save network traces, and view packet trace output without leaving the WatchTower platform.
WatchTower Alert Insights
Command Interface allows interaction with systems in the context of alerts, with Smart suggestions for command completion to support operator knowledge, Command arguments provided from alert properties reducing human error, Definitions of commands, syntax, arguments and explanations right where users need them, succeeding the console interface and now connecting through SYSVIEW or OPS/MVS.
Timezone Support allows international teams to communicate in a common timezone, and still correlate with alerting system timestamps by storing timezone offsets with events, enabling normalization of event times to selected timezones.
Global Filter and Tab definition enables administrators to empower their users with pre-defined filtered views of alerts which may either persist as an open tab, alongside a user's own configured tabs, or appear in the filter menu, providing a standardized base for a user's own configuration.
Alert Group Names make integrations more robust and transferable, as a newly supported reference to groups in automation scripts.
WatchTower Dashboards
Out of the Box "Template" Dashboards now available directly within WatchTower user interface without requiring users to manually upload the sample Broadcom Sample Dashboards template file from Broadcom Support. Sample dashboards are now located within a new "Templates" tab. New templates for Network data are also added.
Alert Chart for Dashboards allows users to quickly view alerts of resources within the context of a dashboard.
Timerange Custom Selection for Dashboards enhanced to provide additional ways to specify time dates and hours. Now included are Within Last, Between, Before, and After options.
Historical Dashboards feature allows users to aggregate data over longer periods while avoiding problems with storage of large quantities of metric data. With the advent of historical dashboards, it is now possible to retain data beyond the default 30 days, and access it through the same dashboard user interface.
This screenshot shows sample chart data displaying an hourly aggregated metric.
Note: The Historical Dashboards is an opt-in feature. You must enable the historical dashboards explicitly. When the feature is enabled, automatic rollups begin.
WatchTower ML Insights
Machine Learning Monitoring Rules enable metrics for machine learning directly within the UI, rather than through a manual configuration file, including which resources to monitor, thresholds and severity levels, and where to target alerting or further automations and actions.
Metrics Support has been enhanced to add support for more NetMaster and SYSVIEW metrics. Metrics added for SYSVIEW Capacity Metrics, SYSVIEW metric name changes (% to Pct), and NetMaster Security Network Metrics.
WatchTower Topology
Alert Hotspots are fetched and rendered onto Topology more quickly, particularly on larger maps, with a smoother workflow connecting Topology Exploration to filtered views of alerts.
Enhanced Edge Detection enriches graphs, improving performance of recognizing complex connections between CICS and Db2/MQ.
WatchTower Real-Time Streaming (z/IRIS) 1.3.0
With this release, users can visualize and monitor the availability of Java-based business services on z/OS using new OpenTelemetry Metrics that depict the memory usage and garbage collection (GC) events of JVMs. These JVM GC Metrics leverage data produced by SYSVIEW's Java GC Agent to provide unique insights into the resource utilization of Java services on mainframe.
The image below shows the zos.jvm.memory.used_after_last_gc metric being used to visualize two versions of the same Insurance application where version 1 (in green) depicts consistent memory management whereas version 1.1 (in yellow) depicts a memory leak. For a list of all the JVM GC metrics included in this release, refer to the z/IRIS JVM GC Metrics technical documentation.
Figure 1 Example of visualizing a JVM memory leak in Grafana.
Further improvements include:
● Support for OTLP/HTTP in addition to the existing gRPC streaming functionality
● Enable easier identification of distinct z/OS services when trace data is aggregated into service maps
We encourage you to visit the WatchTower Platform™ Suite product information page at Support and Tech Docs, where you can find information about all WatchTower Capabilities: Alert Insights, ML Insights, Topology, Real-Time Streaming (zIRIS) and Application Profiler.
You can download your copy of WatchTower Platform™ Suite 1.2 and all relevant capabilities online at Support where you can also utilize the case management system. To install your product, follow the installation procedures for your product at Tech Docs. If you have any questions or require assistance, contact Support.
Please note that WatchTower 1.1 End of Service date is June 30, 2025 and we encourage you to migrate to WatchTower 1.2 as soon as possible to take advantage of the new features and enhancements.
Should you need any assistance in understanding these new features, or implementing this latest release, our implementation services partners can help. Please contact your local account representative for more information on how they can help. To connect, learn, and share with other customers, join and participate in our WatchTower Platform™ Community.
For a list of Mainframe Education courses recommended by role, please visit the Learning Paths and select the desired product. We update courses based on functional impact as well as high-demand; therefore, courses created from previous releases may apply to the current release.
Please review our End of Service / End of Life Policy at Broadcom Maintenance Policy Handbook.
Thank you again for your business.