Air France-KLM deploys Progress Actional to boost application visibility

Airline's Gershon Janssen outlines the challenges the company faced during implementation

Airline group Air France-KLM has begun rolling out Progress Software's Progress Actional business transaction assurance tool across its IT infrastructure in a bid to gain full visibility of application processes.

Gershon Janssen, IT architect for Air France-KLM, told Computing that the group had decided that the investment was necessary due to the lack of an integrated infrastructure.

"We are using Actional to help us monitor and control our operational environment. We had many siloed applications within our web farm infrastructure, and we also were, and are, trying to align the business and IT functions," said Janssen.

"We started by applying it to one application, a web-based client booking tool that had caused us problems.

"This application is supported by a set of 25 to 30 web services," he added.

"When we first put this application into production with this big group of web services we realised it was going to be difficult to manage.

"If the user experience wasn't good we didn't know where to look, we didn't know which web services were slow or not working; this was a serious challenge."

Janssen explained that the application suffered some outages and the fact that Air France-KLM had difficulty figuring out where the problem was, prompted it to tender for a tool to conduct process analysis, and eventually choose Progress Software.

Janssen decided to find software that would provide this visibility two years ago, it took nine months to select Progress, and months of design and engineering to create a suitable solution. Air France-KLM has now been using Actional for two months.

The online booking application accounts for about 15 per cent of Air France-KLM's infrastructure. The Progress tool will be rolled out across the remaining 350 web services over the next year. Air France-KLM's web services generate about 15GB of data every hour.

"We have only rolled out the software to this application currently but are going to roll it out across the entire environment over the course of the next year to get full visibility. We want end-to-end visibility within the whole enterprise so that if something goes wrong when a customer books a ticket, we will be able to see exactly what happened and where," said Janssen.

"At this stage we are seeing some early benefits that will provide a better understanding of how our applications function in production. When you design an application you expect it to run in production as you designed it, but this is not always the case. For example, we have a clearer understanding of the behaviour of the application, the load we are putting on it, behaviour of third parties and other back ends we are relying on," he added.

"However, we are not using alerts yet because we are still learning how to interpret all the new information that we have. You cannot just set a threshold on these things, that wouldn't be a good strategy because you would probably end up having half a million alerts within an hour".

Janssen currently has a project running to rectify this, where policy will be defined on how best to implement alerts after establishing trends within the information.

The Actional deployment was not without its problems.

"Security was a problem for us; we didn't know how to align the product with our security systems for things such as authentication and authorisation. Also, we struggled with privacy issues, where for example, if a customer books a ticket on our web site and their credit card details are in there, these need to be taken out," he added.

"I would have loved some guidance on some of these problems. I know it's difficult for a vendor, because we have a large infrastructure with lots of systems and settings, but it would have been nice to get an action plan up front saying we would have to consider certain difficult points beforehand."