To improve network monitoring, configuration, and troubleshooting across 150 national and international networks, Swiss private company Flughafen Zürich AG has deployed Riverbed (News - Alert) Cascade Shark and Cascade Pilot as application performance management solutions for Zürich Airport in Switzerland. As a result, Flughafen Zürich has been able to improve employee productivity and enhance customer service by reducing troubleshooting time from hours to minutes.

The Zurich Airport serves more than 24 million passengers annually. To operate the airport, Flughafen Zürich AG works with more than 270 partners, including nearly 90 domestic and international airlines as well as retailers, hotels, and restaurants. All of these partners have their own wide area networks (WANs) that connect to and rely on the airport local area network (LAN) for accessing their mission critical applications such as bookings, reservations, and check-in. As a result, the airport LAN connects to approximately 150 national and international networks and has more than 14,000 connection points.

According to Riverbed, network engineers at Flughafen Zürich were spending significant time trying to get to the root of application and server issues. While Flughafen Zürich used Wireshark network protocol analyzer to capture traffic data, they still needed a solution that could simplify network configuration and monitoring.

In a statement, Stefan Thoma, senior network engineer at Flughafen Zürich AG said that  "Given the complexity of our infrastructure, previously, if problems arose, a network engineer had to walk around the airport with test equipment to set-up traces at hot spots, such as a data center." "Other engineers may have been working on the same problem in other parts of the airport, and the customer's own engineering staff could be coordinating with us from another continent, which could take up hours of our time. We needed a solution that was faster and more efficient.

As per the release, Flughafen Zürich deployed Cascade Shark appliances at three key points, including two data centers and an airport exchange where all networks are routed and firewalled. With the possibility of multi-segment analysis, Flughafen Zürich is able to see that network traffic data and even the routing is asymmetric. This has simplified analysis dramatically for the airport.

Likewise, Cascade Pilot offered seamless network analysis as well as tight integration with Wireshark for isolating the specific packets needed to diagnose and troubleshoot complex performance issues.

Software troubleshooting can now be resolved in minutes by a single employee in the data center through an easy-to-use graphical user interface, dramatically enhancing IT productivity and the user experience, said Riverbed. In addition, because the company no longer needs several people to collect and analyze data, Flughafen Zürich is able to deploy its engineers more efficiently and take advantage of real-time information and historical data to help resolve network issues before they affect application performance, added Riverbed.