SITA-CaseStudy

IN BRIEF

Industry

• Retail

Solution

• APM Xpert Product Suite

SITA

SITA and Riverbed Introduce APM to Air Transport Industry

SITA, the global air transport IT solutions specialist, and OPNET(acquired by Riverbed Technology in 2012), the leader in application performance management (APM), have created a partnership to support the air transport industry’s growing need for APM solutions.

Under the new partnership, SITA and OPNET recently worked together to implement a new APM platform at a tier one US airport with more than 50 million passengers annually.

Challenge:

In early 2010, the network, database and infrastructure teams realized that their current toolset was no longer adequate. The number of applications and their user base was growing, and so was the number of application performance incidents reported to the helpdesk. Resolving problems with applications was often time consuming given how modern applications are designed and deployed across multiple systems and IT domains.

Outages and response-time problems with critical airport applications directly led to disruptions of airport services. With daily operations increasingly dependent on complex IT applications, APM became a high priority.

Senior engineers from the network, infrastructure, and database teams often found themselves troubleshooting the same problems in parallel, wasting significant time, and not always finding the true causes of complicated issues. They decided to work together to find a more automated way of troubleshooting -- one that progresses efficiently from the end-user’s view of performance to the root causes of problems.

Solution:

OPNET’s APM Xpert ™ suite was selected over competing technologies as the new platform, and

implementation was performed smoothly without any roadblocks. Intuitive dashboards gave the airport broad, immediate visibility into application performance across the different application tiers.

Benefits:

As a result of the new partnership, the airport’s IT team is now able to:

• Quantify application responsiveness before customers call the helpdesk.

• Conclusively determine if end user experience issues are due primarily to application or network problems.

•Provide the application or network team with the granular information necessary to fix problems, reducing the mean time to repair.

• Reduce the number of IT members required to solve performance related issues; allowing the rest of the team to focus on revenue-generating projects.

• Make better, faster decisions about where to invest to upgrade performance.

• Improve customer satisfaction based on more available and better performing applications.

Today the airport team uses the OPNET APM platform to monitor all of their public and internal datacenter applications. They are also still discovering new ways to utilize APM methodologies to help improve overall IT efficiency, such as using APM reports to enhance capacity planning.

About SITA

SITA is the world’s leading specialist in air transport communications and IT solutions. SITA delivers and manages business solutions for airline, airport, GDS, government and other customers over the world’s most extensive network, which forms the communications backbone of the global air transport industry. For more information please visit us on the web at: www.sita.aero