Case Study: NORAD Santa Tracker achieves worldwide Santa-tracking reliability and data-driven insights with Microsoft Power BI

NORAD Santa Tracker: Ageless magic shared around the world with latest Azure technology

NORAD Santa Tracker faced the annual challenge of delivering a highly reliable, high‑traffic Santa-tracking experience to millions of families on December 24 while monitoring public sentiment and site performance. Microsoft Power BI and other Microsoft Azure services (including Azure Blob Storage, Azure Cognitive Services/Text Analytics, Azure Front Door, Application Insights and FastTrack for Azure) supported the effort to scale the static HTML/JavaScript site, mobile apps, and analytics pipelines so the volunteer-run program could remain simple, fast, and globally available.

The vendor implemented a serverless PaaS architecture on Azure with Azure Front Door CDN, Application Insights/Log Analytics for telemetry, Cognitive Services for sentiment analysis, and Power BI dashboards for real‑time monitoring and decision‑making. Microsoft Power BI–backed analytics plus FastTrack load testing and DevOps automation helped the team detect and resolve issues before they spread, support millions of visitors reliably, and keep the Santa Tracker running smoothly without taxpayer funding.

NORAD Santa Tracker

Preston Schlachter

Program Manager