Frontier Airlines

Overview

Frontier Airlines is a low fare airline that provides service from its Denver hub to 47 destinations in 29 states, spanning the nation from coast to coast and to seven cities in Mexico and one in Canada. As the second largest jet carrier of Denver International Airport (DIA), Frontier’s fleet of Airbus jets averages 250 daily system-wide departures and arrivals, serving 24 out of the top 25 destinations out of Denver. The company employs about 4,800 people in cities throughout North America.

Frontier’s MPLS WAN is a critical resource for the airline. It connects the company’s data center in Denver to offices and airports throughout North America. It supports both important customer-facing applications, such as seat assignment, electronic ticketing, curbside and online check-in, as wellas all the logistical and management applications necessary for running a major airline.

But even as the network was rapidly expanding to support Frontier’s business objectives, performance was slowly degrading, and the company’s traditional SNMP device-based management system couldn’t give the IT staff the visibility they needed to meet their Service Level Objectives (SLOs).

“It was like looking at our network through a straw,” says Geri Carolan, Director of IT Infrastructure for the airline. “Our jets may fly at 30,000 feet, but our network management system could barely lift us above the runway in terms of delivering a network-wide overview of performance and utilization.”

Solution

• An AppResponse Xpert Appliance installed at the Denver data center
• Extensive real-time and historical reporting of over 60 critical metrics
• Easy drill down to problem cause
• Reports network and application performance metrics in terms of business impact