Improving Performance of Business-critical Applications via Intelligeni Observe for a Global Aviation Services Company

Overview

The client, a Global Aviation Services Holding Company operating in 50+ countries, was facing severe performance degradation issues with its business-critical applications leveraged in the aviation services and the internal logistics and operations, impacting the user experience and productivity of its business users. Microland deployed its Intelligeni Observe platform to integrate with client monitoring tools and build custom monitors and dependency models to bring observability capabilities for faster issue detection and diagnostics.

About Client

The client is a prominent global Aviation Services Holding Company, which operates eight airline companies across Europe, South Africa, Asia, and Australia. They are renowned for ACMI (Aircraft, Crew, Maintenance, Insurance) airline operations, scheduled and charter cargo, and passenger services, aircraft leasing, maintenance, and parts support. With a diverse team of 3,000 members representing 50+ nations, they boast an impressive fleet of 160 aircraft. Last year, they successfully served over 8.4 million passengers and transported over 800,000 tons of cargo through over 110,000 flights, all driven by a shared commitment to delivering exceptional customer service worldwide.

Business Challenges

The client’s aviation services to its customers and the internal logistics and operations are dependent on a set of business-critical operations used for airline maintenance and operations, flight planning, scheduling, and movements. This makes it imperative for business applications to have high availability, performance, and reliability for the client’s business users to deliver services to their end clients without disruptions.

Based on the existing monitoring and alerting setup, the operations team was confident that the performance of business-critical applications was within the agreed-upon contractual limits. However, the business users from multiple countries and offices were facing performance degradation in terms of availability and reliability of the applications while accessing them via the Citrix services. The IT Ops team was unable to diagnose and resolve the issue promptly thus impacting the user experience, productivity, and service delivery of the business users.

Our Solution

Based on the challenges discussed with the business users around the performance degradation of the business-critical applications and those of the IT Ops team in identifying the root cause, the Microland team modeled the solution around our Intelligeni Observe platform.

1. The Microland team worked with the business applications team and modeled the entire business user experience in Intelligeni Observe. This comprised of modeling dependencies of user experience concerning site network, Citrix environment, and application environment (application components and infrastructure components)
2. Intelligeni Observe was integrated with SolarWinds (network monitoring tools), Citrix Monitor, and GCP monitoring tool (where the applications were hosted).
3. Intelligeni Observe provided unified observability by collating logs and metrics across the different monitoring sources and correlating alerts/events from different sources. This allowed quick detection and resolution of any performance degradation issues
4. Any monitoring gaps in the client’s monitoring tools were plugged with custom monitors built into the Intelligeni Observe platform.
5. The ChatOps collaborative interface along with in-built diagnosis capabilities in Intelligeni Observe allowed quick diagnosis of issues.

Value Delivered

1. 40% reduction in Mean Time to Detect (MTTD): Integrating the client’s multiple monitoring tools with and building custom monitors on Intelligeni Observe led to faster issues/incident detection.
2. 50% reduction in issue diagnosis time: Integrating multiple monitoring sources and modeling dependencies in network and apps environment impacting the user experience in Intelligeni Observe to correlate alerts/events through multiple sources led to faster issue diagnoses.