Air Canada on flight path to be a top global airline with Dynatrace

Building a better user experience

On a path to become a top 10 global airline in everything it does, Air Canada understands the need to deliver customer service excellence all the time, every time. That means resolving application and software issues quickly and effectively, and understanding how customer experience and application delivery influences each other to get a complete picture.

“It was all about gaining visibility,” said Mick Huynh, IT Operations Manager, Air Canada. “We decided to bring on a digital performance management solution so that we could more easily see where a business decision could drive an IT adjustment, and vice versa, where IT insights could provide a competitive business edge. We quickly found that Dynatrace was the perfect solution to marry the two and help all stakeholders speak the same language and work toward the same goals.”

Chosen for its deep application insight, ease of use, cloud model and speed of deployment, Dynatrace was not only the right fit to help Air Canada understand its application behaviors for a better user experience, but to gain the visibility it was looking for to better align its business services and IT metrics.

“We’re making immediate and significant IT gains with Dynatrace,” continued Huynh.

“Honestly, it’s been like an indoctrination – a realization of how things work and the impact IT has in the real world. There’s more accountability and ownership, and Dynatrace has made things more tangible for our team, which has led to a palpable shift in culture. There’s a level of excitement now in monitoring our apps and systems. People realize it’s not just about numbers going up and down; these apps are affecting services and customers. There’s a translation through to service excellence.”

Prioritizing performance in a complex IT environment

Dynatrace’s ability to monitor the performance of every application, everywhere was essential for Air Canada’s highly complex IT environment. Working across numerous datacenters and legacy IT infrastructure, as well as multiple vendors and separate lines of business, Air Canada needed an overarching view of its footprint to help improve performance issues.

Dynatrace also helped shed light on other previously undetected performance issues that were impacting the customer experience.

“Dynatrace surprised us,” Huynh continued. “The platform helped us prioritize certain services for uptime that were going overlooked. For instance, we were measuring one service in seconds; but Dynatrace helped us see that any incident over 200 milliseconds made the service unusable. This was a problem we wouldn’t have even been aware of without Dynatrace. We couldn’t have even caught it since we weren’t monitoring it granularly enough, but Dynatrace did and we were able to easily trigger alerts so it wouldn’t occur again.”

“We’ve often talked about being able to call our users about an issue before they call us. This is now a reality for many areas of the business.”

More to come from Air Canada and Dynatrace

Since Air Canada’s initial implementation of the Dynatrace platform, it has continued rolling it out to more business areas and critical services. And, based on the continued results and support Air Canada has seen, the company is eager to progress its work with Dynatrace.

“We have identified 40 critical services we want to use Dynatrace with,” said Huynh. “We’re about half way there so far and have already trained over 30 people on the platform. We’ve implemented it mainly for our operational and user experience business areas, but are now also working to roll it out for Maintenance and Flight Operations, and so on. And, if the support continues to be what it’s been, we’re certain it will be a productive endeavor.

“In fact, the support team has been great from the start. Their flexibility and out-of-the-box thinking really stood out. Even from the get go when we needed to do a POC because of some unique challenges in how we’re set up, they found a way to do it and got it done one time with the results we were looking for. We’re all excited for that to continue and have great confidence in the team at Dynatrace,” concluded Huynh.