October 2025
To: Broadcom Mainframe Customers
From: The WatchTower Product Team
Subject: General Availability Announcement for WatchTower Platform™ Suite 1.3
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 1.3 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 Dashboards
Improved Resource Filtering. Build rules in Dashboards for selecting or excluding resources based on granular criteria. (For example, to select CICS Regions starting with 'Prod'). This feature improves filtering for resource selection.
Dual-Axis Charts and Mixed Type Charts allow you to chart two separate y-axes (left and right) and view their relationship. Mixed charts provide a way to visually differentiate and compare the data from two metrics. These new chart-making features give you a new toolset for displaying and comparing metric data.
New Templates Added, Existing Ones Enhanced. To get the most out of WatchTower right away, more dashboard templates related to Network Insights are now included. And many of the existing dashboard templates have been enhanced.
Timezone in Charts and Dashboards
The Time Range button on a dashboard now includes the Timezone field. You can select from a list of timezones to set the timezone in which date and time results are expressed.
Other UI Improvements in Dashboards
When you create or edit a chart, the Property Pane is now on the left. This makes it easier to enter chart properties and see the results quickly. Plus, you can now use a slider to increase or decrease the size of the Properties Pane. When you scroll down in a dashboard, the filter menu bar remains visible at the top, so it is easy to access the filters at all times. You can highlight a graph in a chart now by hovering over its name. Also, the margins are now tighter between the charts on a dashboard, which makes for more efficient use of screen space. Chart labels are now located on the left side of a chart, rather than on the right. Again, this is done for more efficient use of screen real estate.
WatchTower ML Insights
Metric Units are now supported and displayed. While you create a chart, based on the metric in question, the unit is automatically selected and displayed on the chart. In Dashboard charts, the units in which a metric is expressed are visible on the Y-axis. In dual-axis charts, the units that correspond to the two metrics display on the left and right Y-axes, as applicable.
In this example, metric units (percentage signs) appear on the left and right axis automatically due to the metric selected.
Easily Access Metric Metadata. When creating or editing a dashboard chart or ML Monitoring Rule, you can now click on the metric name (highlighted in blue background) in the Metric field to get detailed information about that metric.
WatchTower Alert Insights
Out Of The Box Integration is enabled by a default alert rule and group to receive alerts from integrated Broadcom products, such as SYSVIEW, OPS/MVS, Netmaster and WatchTower ML Insights. This promotes a seamless integration experience with end-to-end testing, before the WatchTower configuration is tailored to meet specific operational needs.
Alert Rules now allow administrators to match alerts on a broad set of criteria and update many more alert properties. The new design aligns with the alert filtering workflow, introducing matching criteria that support powerful logical statements. Rules are evaluated in rank order, with the first matched rule acting on the alert.
WatchTower Network Insights
Autodiscovery of NetMaster Regions Simplifies Installation with a process that now identifies the list of NetMaster Service instances, and automatically populates the region selector in the Network Insights interface. When integrating NetMaster with WatchTower, you no longer need to enter an API Service ID and Region ID for each NetMaster API Service instance in the install-values.yaml file.
Download Traces in PCAP Format from the saved and active traces views, as well as packet-level views. This capability provides Network Insights users with a means to export trace information in a standard format that can be parsed and analyzed by applications such as Wireshark.
User Interface Enhancements for the Network Insights user interface include the ability to stop running traces from the Active Traces list and the Packet List, view active or saved traces from the Connection List, and start, stop, and delete traces directly from the Connection List.
WatchTower Topology
Component View has been redesigned to offer a more streamlined navigation experience, showing the nearest neighbor by default and connections between CICS, Db2, and MQ and various other entities. It is now possible to display a more comprehensive graph of Mainframe connections that also includes the connections from external networks through z/OS Connect.
WatchTower Installation
Deploy NIM-SM on Kubernetes alongside WatchTower. Prior to this release, a separate Linux system was needed to deploy NIM-SM, which enabled WatchTower to integrate with various service desks for ticket creation. The Linux system is no longer a requirement, as it is packaged to be deployed on Kubernetes. Containerization simplifies deployment within the WatchTower Platform ecosystem and promotes seamless access for any Capability that supports integration with third-party ticketing services.
The deployment of NIM SM follows the same approach as other WatchTower components, relying on the install.sh WatchTower installer script.
ACC Native TLS Support now enables optional ACC implementation without PAGENT configuration changes to AT-TLS, providing a path to simplify installation and reduce the number of roles involved.
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, Dashboards, Topology, Real-Time Streaming (zIRIS) and Application Profiler.
You can download your copy of WatchTower Platform™ Suite 1.3 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 1.2 End of Service date is November 30, 2025 and we encourage you to migrate to WatchTower 1.3 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.
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