The Importance of Timely Connections: In Airports and in Your Network

While travelers hope to make their connecting flights for the holidays, major airports are also wishing for seamless connections this season

Girl in the airport checking flight status

With the holiday season in full swing, it’s understood that airports will be filled with chaos. But since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, airports have become even more hectic. Staffing shortages have led to long lines at ticketing, baggage check-in, security, and customer service stations. And that’s all before considering the limited staff resources for the actual airlines themselves. Staffing shortages as a result of buyouts, furloughs, and layoffs during the pandemic have increased wait times and extended every step of the travel process in airports. Because of this, it is critical that operational processes go smoothly. 

Network and application outages that impact airports can have catastrophic impacts on overall operations, which may impact the ability to make voice calls, check flight statuses, withdraw money, submit paperwork, and more. When disruptions occur in systems the airport controls, gaps in visibility lead to outages and delayed troubleshooting that can have a significant impact on the bottom line of major airports—not to mention damaging news headlines and both employees and travelers left disappointed and frustrated by a negative experience. 

Automation is key for airports today seeking to streamline operational processes, improve efficiency, and reduce costs associated with physical resources. Digital transformation has changed the way people navigate airports, with smartphones and wearables being an integral piece of the traveling process as flyers rely on mobile applications for check-in, ticket download, gate updates, and more. When these applications malfunction, airports are strained by the repercussions as they scramble to troubleshoot and restore connections to normalcy. NETSCOUT solutions help optimize the customer experience by proactively monitoring the environment to provide visibility IT organizations can use to limit the impact of service issues that can affect travelers directly.

Using advanced Smart Data, NETSCOUT provides integrated, smarter analytics that help maintain connections between airport data centers, application services, multicloud environments, and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. Deep-packet inspection empowers network operations teams to triage service issues according to priority, so that impact of application degradations and mean time to repair (MTTR) can be reduced.

Learn how NETSCOUT performance management solutions can help airport leaders prepare their network and applications for takeoff and continuous operation this holiday season.