Alaska Airlines uses ExtraHop to ensure that flights take off

The Wall Street Journal recently posted an article titled Ensuring That Flight Takes Off – From The Data Center. The article describes why Alaska Airlines turned to ExtraHop Networks to help solve its application performance issues. Chris Grey, Alaska Airlines’ director of IT operations, explains, “We’ve definitely seen a positive impact, in many cases [the ExtraHop Application Performance Management system] can cut our troubleshooting time in half.” A 50% reduction in mean time to resolution (MTTR) is just one of the reasons the ExtraHop system is used extensively within the travel industry by companies including Expedia, Continental Airlines, Kayak, Carlson, and others.
Reducing MTTR isn’t the only reason for the widespread use of the ExtraHop system in the travel industry. As the WSJ article notes, “applications used to be monolithic, but now they’re spread across several layers, including a Web server, a database and middleware to tie it all together. Those layers have become tougher to manage as applications have become more integrated with each other and data centers have many more servers than they used to.” The ExtraHop system is the only passive solution on the market that offers proactive early warning and accelerated troubleshooting across all tiers, including network, web, database, and storage.
Additionally, as the WSJ article points out, “add in virtualization and cloud computing—two emerging trends that enable applications to be more mobile and distributed than ever before—and the problems are only likely to get worse.” The ExtraHop application performance management system easily recognizes and adjusts to these complex and dynamic environments, analyzing a copy of the production network traffic in real time and extracting the valuable health and performance information. Rather than sample a portion of network traffic or require agents on every device, the ExtraHop system passively and dynamically adjusts to changing environments.
Progressive enterprises are realizing that a retrospective view of their network environment—a view that one might achieve using legacy technologies, such as NetFlow collection, SNMP polling, custom performance agents, or TCP-header inspection—is not sufficient to meet the demands of operating in a competitive environment where problem resolution must occur immediately. Even more importantly, through proactive early warning, trouble spots can be isolated and corrective action taken before a problem even occurs.
Alaska Airlines has made headlines in the past for its technological leadership in the travel industry, and we’re proud to be part of the latest achievements by their IT operations team.
For a copy of our newest case study featuring Alaska Airlines, email j.baker [at] extrahop.com. Let’s explore how the ExtraHop system can get your applications flying faster.