Major U.S. Airline Eliminates Network Downtime by Implementing Golden Configuration Across 5,000+ Devices with Itential

INDUSTRY

Airline & Transportation

GOALS

Eliminate Configuration-Driven Network Downtime
Standardize Network Configuration
Ensure Audit Compliance
Increase Engineer Productivity

USE CASES

Configuration Management

INTEGRATIONS

Key Results

Eliminated 47 hours of downtime per year caused by bad configuration.

Implemented Golden Configuration trees to standardize configuration across 3500 routers and 1500 devices.

Automated configuration management across all 100+ airports.

Reduced engineer time and effort by 83% for configuration management.

Accelerated and automated remediation to ensure compliance across all network devices.

Challenge

Network Transformation Hindered by Bad Configuration

The largest U.S. domestic airline responsible for over 134M passengers a year was tasked with a complete transformation of their network. The environment was full of bad configurations that created over 47 hours of production downtime in one year that meant passengers could not purchase tickets and airplanes could not take off. This resulted in a poor customer experience that directly cost the airline up to a $1M loss per hour of downtime. Solving manual configuration challenges was a $47M opportunity and growing.

The configuration drift happened primarily due to time and staff limitations. The nature of their business meant teams must work within short change windows, and the team was not staffed to support the growing volume of work required as the network continued to expand. As a result, the configuration backlog would continue to grow, causing security issues and network incidents due to configurations that were not kept in compliance. The airline’s network and security teams needed a new solution to improve visibility and make change windows more efficient.

The configuration drift started to pile up more and more each year. We didn’t have the right tools to keep up, so without something new we would’ve fallen farther and farther behind.

Network Engineer

Solution

Why They Chose Itential for Automated Configuration & Compliance Management

The airline needed a way to automate and standardize the management of complex configurations across their entire network infrastructure. To eliminate any configuration-based outages, they also needed to improve their security posture through audit compliance and automated remediation. By leveraging the Itential Automation Platform, they were able to execute proactive change management across Cisco IOS routers throughout all their 100+ airports.

With Itential’s configuration management capabilities, they were able to set standardized configurations by implementing a Golden Configuration per location, breaking down network devices based on region, airport, data center, etc. This new approach focused on building orchestrated workflows that incorporate change management activities to deliver configuration changes as end-to-end outcomes from ticket creation to ticket closure.

If we setup two routers for this project and they’re not the same, can you imagine what the field would look like? Itential has made our jobs so much easier by implementing Golden Configuration.

Manager, Network Automation

With Itential, the airline was able to fully orchestrate and standardize configuration management through our:

Single application to efficiently manage device backups, inventory, and changes to CLI-based physical devices along with API-based cloud networking services across any vendor and any OS.
Flexible and reusable Golden Configuration Templates for easily managing any device and service across their entire network.
Automated remediation of all their devices that are out of compliance in minutes, not hours or days, mitigating config drift.
Ability to leverage existing automation efforts in Ansible and Python when building orchestrated workflows, mitigating the need to rip and replace existing work.
Itential Automation Marketplace, offering hundreds of pre-built integrations, workflows, and data transformations to kickstart automation work.
The ability to auto-generate integrations for in-house developed systems, vital for orchestrating processes end-to-end.

Eliminated Network Outages through Automation

This large U.S. airline was able to eliminate any configuration-based outages across the entire country by implementing Golden Configuration with Itential They were also able to completely eliminate any time spent filling out and closing tickets by leveraging Itential’s orchestration and integration capabilities, resulting in an 83% reduction in time and effort.

This gain in efficiency can be credited to the standardization of configurations across their 3,500 routers and 1,500 devices. Now, the airline can audit against their network, run compliance, and then remediate and standardize their network far faster and with fewer errors — and this scalable approach ensures they are prepared as the network continues to expand.