Case Study: Alaska Airlines ensures uptime for 25 business-critical applications with ExtraHop

ExtraHop Helps Alaska Airlines Ensure That 25 Business-Critical Applications Do Not Fail

Alaska Airlines, the eighth-largest U.S. carrier handling over 16 million passengers annually, relies on more than 25 business‑critical applications—from crew scheduling and baggage logistics to e‑commerce—running across a complex, distributed three‑tier infrastructure and tier‑1 datacenters linked to airports nationwide. That scale and complexity made pinpointing intermittent slowness and failures difficult, and the airline would not accept underperformance that could impact operations or revenue.

ExtraHop delivered passive, transaction‑level monitoring across all tiers (including zero‑overhead Informix visibility) and was scaled from a 2000 to a 5000 appliance to cover 10Gbps of critical traffic. The result was proactive early warnings, much faster root‑cause identification without intrusive database profiling, and sustained improvements in application and network performance—helping Alaska Airlines maintain higher operational reliability and faster troubleshooting.

Alaska Airlines

Kris Kutchera

Vice President of Information Technology