Case Study: Manchester Airport Group achieves real-time airport security monitoring with Elastic

Monitoring Airport Security Operations with Canvas & Elasticsearch

Crimson Macaw partnered with Manchester Airport Group to build real-time security operations dashboards for Stansted Airport, consolidating data from on‑prem databases, S3 files, STOMP feeds and external APIs. The project required sub‑one‑minute polling of databases and handling gzip‑compressed STOMP messages, and Canvas (the visualization tool they chose) was only available as a Kibana plugin so the team hosted Kibana in MAG’s AWS environment during the technology preview.

Using Elasticsearch as the storage layer, Crimson Macaw patched logstash‑input‑jdbc to support second‑based schedules, created a logstash‑codec‑gzip to decompress multi‑line XML messages, and developed Canvas plugins (timezone date formatting, HTML/handlebars and dynamic styling) to deliver tailored visuals. The iterative, stakeholder‑driven dashboards — including Security Hub, Security Pod, Flight Departures and Train Arrivals — provided real‑time situational awareness, improved decision‑making and operational efficiencies across Airport Security.

Manchester Airport Group

Stuart Hutson

Head of BI and Analytics