Air France-KLM delivers seamless, sustainable flying experiences with Dynatrace

Air France-KLM strives to be a responsible leader in European air travel, with a strategy built on three pillars: exceptional customer service, sustainable aviation, and becoming technology-advanced. To fulfill its strategy, the airline has a 6-chapter plan, focusing on areas like enhancing customer experience, securing funding, and driving digital transformation. Air France-KLM views these areas as interconnected – buying more sustainable planes requires higher profits, which depends on stable airline operations without delays and cancellations and excellent customer experiences.

The airline recognized that all the operations in its plan are underpinned by IT – from flight schedules to ticket sales. Therefore, stabilizing IT operations and ensuring service reliability is critical to meeting profitability and reputational targets. Air France-KLM also seeks to reduce the environmental impact of its growing IT infrastructure by moving to more sustainable data centers in the cloud. During this migration, it is essential the airline maintains business-as-usual operations, so customer experience and flight operations are not jeopardized.

Air France-KLM needed an intelligent approach to monitoring its digital services and flight operations so it could identify issues before flights were impacted. It selected Dynatrace for its end-to-end observability, cloud readiness, and AI capabilities. Historically, resolving problems took a lot of manpower, with numerous siloed monitoring tools identifying issues requiring lengthy war-rooms while revenue was being lost. Now, Dynatrace instantly detects the root cause of issues so they can be passed to the relevant team.

“Nothing flies without IT running seamlessly. If customers can’t buy tickets, or airline operations are disturbed this can lead to cancellations and our profits are impacted. This stops us reinvesting in the airline’s future,” comments Jos Kerssens, Senior Vice President IT Operations & Cloud Transformation for Air France-KLM. “The AI and prediction capabilities from Dynatrace were a differentiator. We now have confidence that any problems that arise can be dealt with quickly to dramatically reduce operational and revenue impact.”

• Optimize cloud migration: Dynatrace ensures Air France-KLM’s services and operations continue to run seamlessly during its cloud migration program. 80% of the airline’s e-commerce applications are now on Azure, while all data analytics and datalakes are on GCP. Since Dynatrace is cloud-ready, it gives Air France-KLM complete insight into all of the complexities of its cloud environments, so the airline can improve operations. The move to the more sustainable cloud data centers also supports Air France-KLM’s sustainability goals.
• Accelerated Root-Cause Identification: Since implementing Dynatrace two years ago in the e-commerce department, Air France-KLM has been able to swiftly identify and address issues, pinpointing the exact root cause. Now, with an enterprise-wide contract, it is extending this success wall-to-wall across the organization, retiring legacy monitoring tools. Dynatrace’s ability to provide precise, actionable insights helps eliminate time wasted on triaging and prevents costly war-room scenarios. This is particularly critical to Air France-KLM’s complex e-commerce environment, with its modern architecture of containerized applications, microservices, and mobile platforms.
• Laying the groundwork for reliable, rapid innovation: Air France-KLM’s DevOps teams are in the initial stages of integrating data from Dynatrace to enhance their testing and software development processes. While the full potential is yet to be realized, the increased visibility into the technology stack is expected to provide valuable insights into service interdependencies and potential impacts. As the use of Dynatrace expands, the airline anticipates that this will enable teams to innovate with greater confidence, ensuring that changes are introduced without unexpected disruptions.
• Seamless operations: Air France-KLM are using the AI-powered insights from Dynatrace as an early warning system to prevent problems before they happen. By shifting from a reactive to a proactive approach, the airline has won back time to focus on optimizing its services. This is helping deliver its strategy of excellent flying experiences that increase profitability so it can reinvest for continual improvement.

“We are re-training our people to use data from Dynatrace to solve the small issues so that big problems which impact our revenues and planes in the sky don’t happen,” continued MaiLan Tran. “In the future, we hope to apply Dynatrace’s data to make better business decisions – such as why there might be lower sales in an area.”