The Control Tower 

Every day, this major global airline coordinates millions of customer interactions across a sprawling estate of applications, services, infrastructure, and data centers. Some workloads run in the cloud. Others remain on premises. Middleware and other critical layers connect the two. And when visibility breaks down, the first people who notice aren’t the IT team.  They’re the customers.

Stuck in a Holding Pattern 

The airline's technology environment had grown faster than its ability to see across it. 

Fragmented Visibility. Multiple tools monitored different parts of the stack, with each providing only a partial view. Teams saw plenty of signals, but not which signals belonged to which problems. 

Critical Blind Spots. With the various tools came additional visibility gaps in the middleware platforms. Without a complete topology and dependency view, teams didn’t have context for how a problem in one layer might affect another. 

A Faster Pace. The adoption of cloud technologies, microservices, and new applications were driving that rapid change. And more change meant more telemetry, and more noise that risked burying important signals. 

A Long Way to Resolution. When issues did occur, teams wanted to be able to correlate events, investigate root causes, and resolve them quickly. Otherwise, they risked technical issues becoming customer-facing ones. 

Airlines especially know the importance of signals and coordination. Their entire business revolves around it. When pilots are in the air, they want to know the people on the ground can get them all the information they need to make a clean landing. For this endeavor, the airline wanted a partner it could rely on for visibility, to connect strategy to implementation and rationalize the monitoring landscape. 

Ground Control 

This project aligned with two areas of AHEAD’s expertise. 

• Operational Excellence: Assessing the airline’s observability strategy, identifying gaps in correlation and coverage, and establishing a full operating picture. 
• Platform & Workload Modernization: Designing a mixed environment of cloud and on-premises technologies for new microservices and applications. 

The work unfolded across three phases: 

Advise 

AHEAD and the airline began by figuring out where visibility was breaking down across the stack. They investigated how applications, data centers, and middleware fit together, and where teams were losing time moving between them. This approach to observability focused on end-to-end traceability and service relationships. 

Why the Groundwork Mattered: The airline now had a shared understanding of how its critical applications and dependencies fit together. 

Build 

AHEAD then implemented application topology and dependency maps, using Dynatrace as the observability foundation. Relationships became easier to see and investigate. The airline was able to better rationalize monitoring tools. And teams could serve as IT ground marshals, directing Tier 1 events into the correlation layer. The standout solution was Common Service Data Model (CSDM) application mapping for Tier 1 applications, so those critical applications were connected to the services and technology underneath them. 

How It Came to Life: Observability became a working operational capability that showed the full scope of what was affected. 

Run 

Teams could now move faster from detection to investigation to resolution. The airline could keep onboarding new business applications and migrating to the cloud without having to sacrifice visibility or support. 

How It Kept Delivering: The airline can approach incidents with less guesswork, using the same foundation to improve signal quality even as it expands coverage. 

Final Approach 

The airline has already seen significant improvements. 

Faster Recovery. Mean time to resolve for Tier 1 applications fell by 40%, with teams moving faster from detection to restoration. 

Less Noise. Alert compression reached 97%, which reduced the volume of signals operators had to sort through and made remaining alerts more actionable. 

Better Coverage. 100% of Tier 1 events were routed to the correlation layer. CSDM application mapping established a clearer service context for critical applications. 

A Stronger Foundation. Combining topology and dependency maps with a rationalized monitoring created a scalable path to future, predictive monitoring for an improved customer experience.

What’s Next 

The airline plans to keep extending its newfound visibility with predictive analytics, and without recreating the same blind spots as before. Observability isn't only an IT concern, but a major part of the customer experience. AHEAD helps enterprises connect strategy, platform modernization, and day-to-day operations so teams spend less time chasing signals and more time keeping the business moving.