Overview
Visibility Throughout Airport Environments
Airports operate 24/7, making always-on networks and applications essential to keeping passengers and operations moving through large, distributed environments. The priority is seamless digital experience from curb to gate. However, many other user groups rely on the same infrastructure, including flight crews, maintenance teams, retail and facilities staff, parking operations, and third parties such as FAA air traffic controllers and TSA security check point agents.
That always-on mandate faces daily performance risks from complex, multivendor environments supporting hundreds to thousands of applications and massive daily user volumes. Bandwidth congestion, maintenance updates, misconfigurations, ransomware, malware, and other cybersecurity vulnerabilities can quickly disrupt the passenger journey and airport operations. NETSCOUT helps airports protect network and application performance with scalable visibility across any infrastructure, combining passive and active technology for faster detection and troubleshooting.
Trusted by industry leaders worldwide
Challenges
Managing the Complexity of Airport Network and Application Environments
Costly, Reactive Troubleshooting in Downtime-Intolerant Operations
Unplanned downtime creates immediate financial, operational, and reputational risks for airports. Ground stops, maintenance system outages, and communications failures can cascade into multi-hour outages that increase passenger rebookings and erode revenue.
Lack of End-to-End Visibility Impacts User Experience
As airport network complexity and digital dependency increase, gaps in end-to-end visibility slow troubleshooting, prolong outages, degrade digital experience and make it harder to isolate issues across distributed airport environments.
Expanded Attack Surfaces Increase Risks
Cyberattacks increase security risks across airports’ highly interconnected network environments. As operational systems increasingly connect to enterprise IT and hybrid / public cloud, new attack paths emerge, raising exposure and increasing operational risk.
Uptime, Security Threats, and Operational Resilience
Sophisticated ransomware and DDoS attacks target airport environments, disrupting ticketing, crew operations, and maintenance services, making operational resilience essential to protecting user experience and business continuity.
Costly Data Silos and Fragmented Observability
When telemetry is siloed across operations and security teams, investigations slow down and resolution times stretch. This fragmentation drives higher data retention costs while leaving gaps in visibility across network locations and critical application services.
Outcomes That Matter
Helping Airports Deliver On Their Most Critical Business Objectives
Assure Airport Services - Achieve Quality Traveler Experience
NETSCOUT supports a wide range of airport applications, including self-check-in, baggage tracking, maintenance scheduling, and payment authorization. Real-time, packet-level visibility helps IT quickly pinpoint and resolve application-specific issues across the airport ecosystem.
Dramatically Lower MTTK and MTTR
Proactive monitoring pinpoints issues and their root cause quickly, giving IT actionable insight. This dramatically lowers mean time to knowledge (MTTK) and mean time to resolve (MTTR), restoring performance for travelers, crew, retailers, and staff.
Protect Airport Environments and Reduce Financial Damages from Cyber Incidents
Rapid detection and response with NETSCOUT reduces the risk and impact of DDoS attacks and suspicious activity such as lateral movement and data exfiltration, helping prevent operational disruption and minimize financial exposure and potential regulatory fines.
Eliminate Visibility Gaps, Tool Sprawl, and Unnecessary Licensing Costs
Consolidating into a single, vendor-agnostic, enterprise-wide observability solution improves uptime, reduces operational risks across the airport, from gates and retail to passport control / immigration, and Wi-Fi, and lowers licensing and management costs.
Protect and Extend the Value of Existing and Future Investments
Future-proof capital investments in AI, IoT, automation, and robotics and optimize ROI with observability and security solutions that meet today’s operational needs and scale for tomorrow’s growth.
Use Cases
Observability and Security Insights for Airport Organizations
Airport organizations using NETSCOUT improve operational resilience, reduce risk, and help improve the success of their digital initiatives.
What Our Customers Are Saying
“NETSCOUT observability gives us the ability to see exactly what is happening on the wire, rather than depending solely on internal application tools that might not accurately reflect the situation. The support provided has been outstanding."
– William M. Telecommunication Industry | Read full review
Resources
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
What airport applications should be part of proactive observability strategies?
Comprehensive monitoring and analysis, leveraging a network vantage point, provides critical insights into virtually all airport application activity, service dependencies, and the underlying network, including connectivity and traffic paths that impact performance, latency, errors, packet loss and much more. This is critically important for applications used in every area of airport operations, including passenger self-check-in, baggage handling systems, Maintenance, Repair & Overhaul (MRO), retail store operations, and credit card authorizations.
How does NETSCOUT support Zero Trust and security in airport operations?
Security and Zero Trust initiatives are powered by NETSCOUT’s Omnis Cybersecurity solutions, including Omnis Cyber Intelligence and Omnis CyberStream, which provide packet-level insights for validating network segmentation, monitoring policy enforcement, and investigating suspicious activity. It gives airport organizations insights into real-time network behavior to identify lateral movement, exfiltration of confidential data, and control gaps across hybrid environments.
How Can NETSCOUT help with user experience and performance issues throughout the airport?
NETSCOUT supports observability in any remote location the airport IT team needs to assure performance and security including ticket and gate locations, retail and food courts, maintenance locations, parking facilities, as well as Wi-Fi services operating throughout the terminals. NETSCOUT’s solutions for observability deliver proactive monitoring for deep packet inspection (DPI) that enables IT organizations to move beyond reactive troubleshooting into more predictive and preventative postures, which is critical to the success of airports and the traveler journey.
How does NETSCOUT protect the availability of airport operations?
NETSCOUT’s Arbor DDoS protection solution provides airport organizations with multilayer DDoS protection that stops attacks at the edge, scales in the cloud, and adapts in real time. By combining always-on, on-premises mitigation with cloud-scale capacity and AI-driven intelligence, NETSCOUT protects critical airport application and network services from all attack types and sizes.
How does NETSCOUT performance analysis of airport applications differ from competitors’ tools?
NETSCOUT’s patented ASI technology, or Smart Data, delivers IP intelligence and metadata derived from packets. It natively supports over a thousand applications “out of the box,” including airport applications used for both operations and travelers. Flexible configuration options are available to support custom applications. NETSCOUT is the only solution to provide such flexibility.
