Adopting a more-proactive all-round posture on data observability also boosts the airline’s internal productivity and agility.

In order to enhance its online services to deliver exceptional customer experiences, one major airline in Australia has adopted an observability solution for its mobile applications, websites, existing custom applications and a new microservice platform.

By establishing a more proactive observability posture, Virgin Australia obtains deep insights into its digital infrastructure, enabling faster troubleshooting and continuous improvement of its online and internal services. 

The slew of benefits includes:

    • Quicker resolution time: Through automatic correlation with underlying infrastructure, end-to-end traces and code-level performance statistics, the observability solution has significantly reduced the time taken to detect and remediate problems.
    • Reduced volume of critical system P1 and P2 alerts: This provides a clearer single source of truth for support staff to identify issues quickly.
    • Improved developer productivity: The entire development team can focus more on tasks that deliver value to customers, rather than manually monitoring logging and infrastructure tools.
    • Shorter investigation time: Teams are able to get ahead of issues to minimize any impact on the user experience.
    • Improved business-level reporting: Engineering teams can use dashboards to proactively communicate the health of the digital business with the relevant stakeholders in a timely manner.
    • Improved log management: This further improves visibility across the airline’s entire stack.
    • Democratized data access: The observability platform feeds data beyond the typical backend users, making it available to approved groups such as customer service, support, product, sales, marketing, and business executives. Having this data front and center empowers the airline to effectively visualize the relationships among developers, operations, and customers with gives teams an overview of how users are experiencing their app. This is useful for guiding the improvement of infrastructure and strategy.

According to the airline’s Head of Infrastructure and Support, Simon Lawrence:

“The real-time data, flexible query-based thresholding and smart deviation detection has substantially reduced noise and the time required to configure actionable alerting, allowing us to get on the front foot to proactively detect, respond and resolve incidents.”

Said Jason Leonidas, Regional Vice President, New Relic (ANZ), the vendor of the observability platform:

“(We are) proud to have played a role in their transformation and we look forward to supporting the further rollouts … as their systems and infrastructure evolve.”