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Continuous improvement with a central monitoring platform
easyJet began its journey to full-stack observability by joining forces with AppDynamics to optimize its customer-facing services, specifically the easyjet.com website. Peak loads on this channel can grow exponentially, especially during its roster releases when the airline publishes new routes at attractive rates. According to Challis, easyJet can sell 1,000 seats per minute in these moments.
With AppDynamics, easyJet can anticipate and head off performance issues before they materialize. Running load tests to uncover weak points in its customer experience and purchasing journey enables the team to understand how much load its website can take, what gaps need to be filled, and how it needs to work with its software partners to ensure a smooth customer experience during these make-or-break periods.
“Optimization doesn’t happen in the heat of the moment when your systems are at max capacity and you’re just trying to keep up. It happens in the lead-up, when you have time to find faults before they occur,” says Challis. “With AppDynamics, we are constantly gathering information on how to improve our platform and make life better for our employees and customers.”
One of easyJet’s first wins with AppDynamics was the relaunch of easyJet holidays in 2019, turning it from a white-label site for booking flight plus hotel into a true subsidiary of the organization. The ability to monitor and optimize the easyJet holidays platform throughout the integration allowed the business to complete a successful launch in just six months. Today, easyJet holidays is turning a healthy profit and going from strength to strength.
Service improvements from the database to the jetway
Looking to add end-to-end visibility across its network, easyJet added ThousandEyes to gain detailed insight into its network and SaaS cloud solutions.
Full-stack observability from the network to end-user applications is a key pillar of easyJet’s transformation and gives easyJet end-to-end visibility from inside its organization to the network edge and beyond.
Crews at easyJet’s dozens of European bases can connect easily and reliably to the business applications they need to perform their jobs, no matter where they are based. Every location operates as integrated easyJet offices rather than as a remote team with limited IT access.
This level of insight proved invaluable when monitoring a critical crew management application. “If our crew can’t access time-sensitive information, it can result in even a few minutes of delay that could be detrimental to the customer experience,” says Challis.
His team used AppDynamics and ThousandEyes for a complete view of the performance and availability of key applications and its dependencies. With improved observability, easyJet is able to pinpoint the source of any issue quickly and is able to resolve the issue, eliminating any recurrence.
“In the past, we knew there was a fault, but we had no way of knowing if it was in the application layer, middleware, or the database. AppDynamics and ThousandEyes unified dashboard gives us a full view of the user experience from end to end, helping us resolve an issue with one of our most critical applications,” says Challis.
A data-driven airline with a view from above
The complete picture easyJet gained with full-stack observability has turned the airline into a true data-driven organization with a culture of continuous improvement and optimization. easyJet’s use of AppDynamics extends from the application level down into the database, further down into the infrastructure, and up into its employee experience. Combining that with ThousandEyes, covering network performance, the company has an integrated view of its technology stack that covers all three of its IT imperatives as it migrates operations to AWS.
Eyeing a new horizon with non-stop innovation
The strides easyJet has made in IT performance, reliability, and customer experience are only the beginning. Challis and his team are looking to get more proactive in their use of data to help ensure easyJet’s internal platforms constantly evolve with user demands.
“We pride ourselves on being a data-driven airline, both in the sky and in the way we experiment with new technologies to better meet customers’ needs,” says Challis. “With full-stack observability from Cisco, we have gained real-time insight and control over our observability data, which means we can keep enhancing our services for employees and travelers alike.”
