Propelling Airline Operations and Experiences to New Heights with Unified Observability

Today’s airlines operate in more locations and serve more passengers in more ways than ever before. In fact, according to an Oliver Wyman analysis, the global commercial aviation fleet is expected to expand by 33%, to more than 36,000 aircraft by 2033. This expansion signifies an increase in mission-critical applications, alerts, and complex data.

This data can be leveraged to deliver the exceptional experiences customers and staff demand–but only if it’s captured, monitored, and used to its full potential. If it isn’t, it can create more than just a headache, making it difficult to identify and address issues, which can affect passengers and your reputation.

While countless tools are available on the market to help you tame and transform this data into something useful, very few of them are comprehensive and holistic, giving observability across your entire infrastructure. Riverbed steps in with its unified observability platform, highlighting qualified and actionable events before they require reactive measures. Here are a few ways Riverbed empowers airlines to do more with data, focus on the broader picture, and achieve superior outcomes.

Enhancing the customer and employee experience

Your passengers expect easy and efficient experiences from the moment they choose to fly with you. Everything from booking tickets on your website to checking in on their smartphone, dropping bags at your kiosk and enjoying in-flight entertainment must be seamless and satisfying. Meet these needs, and they’ll already be looking forward to their next trip with you–fail to, and they’ll simply travel with someone else in future.

Riverbed can help you meet and exceed the most challenging customer demands by optimizing connectivity and application delivery for reliable reservation systems, ticket processes and check-in, and real-time flight updates.

Employees, too, are driven by their experiences. Their job satisfaction decreases, and they become more likely to leave when they are burdened with outdated IT systems, frequent downtime, and poor data management. Riverbed’s automation and self-healing capabilities free people from fighting fires so they can focus on what really matters, while its user-friendly dashboards make data easy to understand–and services and projects a breeze to prioritize.

Providing unmatched visibility and insight

For smooth operations, even during cloud migrations, you need real-time visibility across all your IT services and your entire infrastructure, applications, and back-end systems. One of the United States’ major airlines was having trouble gaining this across common-use areas. That is, areas of airports that aren’t owned or leased by airlines, where pilots and other staff will go to check manifestos, schedules, route changes, incidents and more. Often, connections would drop between the airport and the airline, offering no reason why–or instructions on what staff needed to do next.

Riverbed IQ, part of our Unified Observability Platform, has empowered the airline to bridge the gap, identifying problems and providing workarounds to deliver team members the information they need to do their jobs effectively. In future, we’ll be working together to move to an AI operations platform–using automation to speed things up, provide even more insight, eliminate the need for war rooms and lower mean time to recovery.

One of the airline’s IT leaders said: “Riverbed IQ is helping my team realize a self-healing network. Using the built-in features of runbooks and AI/ML, we can reduce the number of alerts and capitalize on our automation processes to perform corrective actions to the network before users experience impact. Riverbed IQ is a game changer in monitoring and unified observability.”

Maintaining the performance of critical apps

As we touched on earlier, your apps are more plentiful and vital than ever. One airline we work with has between 1,200 and 2,000 apps – all of which are needed day-to-day – from flight-planning systems and online ticketing to call-center monitoring.

We drove digital transformation and cloud growth for another major US airline, which was tied down by legacy data centers and struggling to innovate as a result. Using Riverbed AppResponse and Riverbed NetProfiler tools, the organization was able to gain full telemetry and proactive problem-solving across their critical reservations system–keeping it running and running well. Since deployment, the airline’s been able to:

• Set a baseline for performance, and see when this isn’t being met
• Map application transactions and become more process-orientated
• Carry out network performance analysis and optimization using both up-to-the-minute and historical data
• Troubleshoot issues and remedy them automatically, at the root
• Integrate our telemetry with customer incident management tools and processes
• Receive real-time alerts that really matter, reducing notification fatigue
• Achieve all this across every one of its cloud and hybrid environments

Boosting sustainability

The aviation industry is under increasing pressure to reduce its carbon footprint–depending less on jet fuel and improving waste management. Riverbed captures actual performance data from all applications and devices, translating it into actionable environmental insights to help you reduce your carbon emissions and protect our planet.

This could mean identifying hotspots in energy consumption, or printers and the number of pages they’ve produced, and automatically minimizing their impact. It may involve finding idle devices that should be shut down–notifying the user to do so and powering off remotely if they don’t respond. Or it might look like quantifying the carbon footprint of user activities, such as sending emails. The possibilities are countless, each supporting you on your journey to net zero while improving your reputation with stakeholders, passengers, and the media.

There’s no doubt that Riverbed’s solutions are changing the game for airlines, elevating digital experiences and putting organizations’ data to work for them. Get in touch with our team now and find out how we can empower you to satisfy the people who matter, stay out of the news, streamline your operations, and speed past the competition.