Alaska Airlines reduces website outages by 60% with AppDynamics

Providing guests and flight crews with flawless digital experiences is a top priority.

Alaska Airlines needed to get full visibility into a complex hybrid cloud environment while deriving insights that would help minimize costly performance issues. The e-commerce team at Alaska Airlines works in an incredibly demanding, complex, and data-rich environment. Whether providing guests with seamless ticket search, travel booking, check-in, or flight notification functionality, or keeping pilots and flight attendants up to date with the information needed to do their jobs, there’s no room for error.

To continually build on its impeccable customer service and satisfaction record, Alaska Airlines uses performance monitoring to both optimize the delivery of their product and ensure customer delight — from ticket purchase to the day of travel and beyond. Inevitably, however, that continual innovation requires more systems, applications, and platforms — both on-premise and in the cloud — which can increase the risk of slowdowns and outages.

With its shift to cloud-first, Alaska Airlines also had to re-architect applications, build cloud-native applications, and manage different workloads across a hybrid environment. As a result, Alaska Airlines turned to AppDynamics for Application Performance Management (APM), Infrastructure Monitoring and visibility, and End User Monitoring (EUM).

Outcomes

Reduced the number of outages by 60%
Reduced mean time to detection from hours to less than 10 minutes
Enabled self-service, big picture view of impacts across the environment

Quickly detect and repair issues before they ever impact guests

AppDynamics provides real-time monitoring of the airline’s applications across the entire infrastructure and technology stack — from guest service applications such as travel searches, ticket purchasing, and boarding passes to applications leveraged by pilots and flight attendants for flight mapping, safety and customer service. This ensures that the business runs smoothly and the airline continues to deliver exceptional user experiences.

According to Troy Kaser, Managing Director of E-commerce at Alaska Airlines, “AppDynamics allows us to see how all our integrated systems are performing, and having that comprehensive view helps us provide the best possible guest service. AppDynamics gives us the ability to quickly detect and repair issues across our entire technology platform and reduce our mean time to resolution. Managing and monitoring application performance and reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) make a very meaningful difference in the lives of our guests.

I'm able to use AppDynamics to give executives the data-driven insights they need in terms of what our users are experiencing and what that means to the bottom line.

Troy Kaser Managing Director of E-commerce, Alaska Airlines

Continuous innovation and significant reduction in outages and MTTR

In the first year AppDynamics was deployed, Alaska Airlines significantly reduced the number of Level 1 and 2 outages. “From 2017 to 2018, through the partnership with AppDynamics, we were able to reduce the number of outages by 60%, and we're continuing to sustain that,” said Kaser. The time and resources saved with AppDynamics is invaluable to the organization.

“With AppDynamics, our mean time to detection went from hours to less than 10 minutes, which is a huge win for us,” said Nemo Hajiyusuf, Software Engineering Manager, Alaska Airlines. “We are always striving to provide the best customer experience possible for our customers. The holistic view of everything in a single pane of glass along with the ability to detect issues and drill down to fix them before they impact our customers means that we provide a flawless digital experience for our customers.”

Supporting the team’s shift to DevOps, AppDynamics provides everybody — engineers, operations and developers — with a real-time view into what Alaska Airlines’ guests are doing and how applications are performing. Teams can make changes with confidence, see how those changes are affecting the entire system, and iterate in real-time.

“Because we are enabling every team member to view that information in real time, they're able to take that in context with the talents and perspectives they have and craft solutions that somebody else couldn't come up with,” said Patrick Boudreaux, Software Engineering Manager, Alaska Airlines. “AppDynamics gives us the big picture to see how the entire ecosystem is coming together and how changes are affecting the customer experience.”

With its “cloud first” strategy, Alaska Airlines leverages Microsoft Azure to improve scalability and flexibility and enable innovation. At the same time, the addition of cloud technology to the environment introduces significant complexity. This is where AppDynamics shines.

AppDynamics on-prem and in Azure gives an end-to-end view

“The adoption of Azure and using the cloud has been a great enabler for our teams,” said Hajiyusuf. “It’s allowed us to have a DevOps culture and a lot more control over our infrastructure. By having a continuous delivery pipeline and leveraging cloud capabilities like microservices and server-less functionality, teams are able to make small increments and innovate more quickly to get cool, new guest innovations out the door. With AppDynamics providing visibility into microservices and containers and all our critical applications running in Azure, we can be sure that we're building solutions that are healthy and reliable,” she said.

With end-to-end visibility into the user’s experience provided by AppDynamics, Alaska Airlines executives can clearly see the business impact its technology is having. “I'm able to use AppDynamics to give executives the data-driven insights they need in terms of what our users are experiencing and what that means to the bottom line through understanding mean time to resolution, mean time to detection, and overall uptime and performance of our platform,” said Kaser. “They can clearly see how we’re using AppDynamics to better manage the totality of the digital experience — from when the customer checks in all the way through their experience.”

AppDynamics allows us to see how all our integrated systems are performing, and having that comprehensive view helps us provide the best possible guest service.

Troy Kaser Managing Director of E-commerce, Alaska Airlines