Airports need to manage multiple operations, such as flight scheduling, passenger movement, finances, and security procedures, to ensure a smooth, safe experience. A strong IT infrastructure is at the heart of this. IT systems aid in airport management by storing data, coordinating activities, and providing real-time updates.
Because IT systems are essential for an airport's basic operations, they have to be monitored for outages to prevent disruptions and chaos. Earlier in 2023, an IT system outage at the Manchester Airport stranded passengers for up to three hours, while similar outages caused disruptions in Hong Kong, Mumbai, and Melbourne.
Network monitoring software specializes in detecting potential outages by tracking down the symptoms of network issues. A powerful network monitoring solution can monitor the IT infrastructure in an airport, detect issues early, and alert network admins before outages occur, saving revenue and time.
Many passengers prefer to check in face-to-face. If the supporting IT systems, like PCs, servers, and printers, go down, the resulting disruption could cause long delays. A network monitoring tool should monitor network devices, servers, and databases constantly across all check-in counters.
Baggage handling operations are intricate and involve large volumes of data. Issues with baggage handling result in long queues, misplaced baggage, and flight delays. IT systems involved in baggage handling, tracking, and transportation must always be available to assist airport staff.
Given the importance of air traffic infrastructure to every nation and the large volumes of people who frequent airports, a distributed network of cameras is required to ensure safety and accountability. Network monitoring software can ensure that these cameras are always up and running by monitoring their hardware health.
Almost all passengers travelling by air have mobile devices and expect good Wi-Fi coverage. Wi-Fi systems also provide good insights into the number and flow of passengers across the airport. Large Wi-Fi installations are managed by wireless LAN controllers (WLCs). These WLCs and the array of Wi-Fi access points across the airport need to be monitored for signal strength, bandwidth usage, and more.
Self-check-in and baggage counters are increasing in popularity in airports across the world. Many passengers prefer to check in online and then drop off their baggage through self-service baggage check-in counters. The websites and applications involved in baggage check-in need to be monitored to ensure 100% availability. Moreover, automated baggage handling needs low-latency, high-availability communication.
Booking airline tickets online is a convenient alternative to waiting in long lines or booking through travel agents. Customer data and schedules are stored on ticketing servers. Threat actors try to steal sensitive information from them or disrupt ticketing operations using DoS attacks. Similarly, airport invoicing systems used for a wide variety of financial operations, such as flight fares, transactions between the airport and the carriers, sales within the airport, and staff payroll, also need monitoring.
In most airports, scheduling involves creating daily and seasonal schedules that detail the arrival and departure times of various flights. Scheduling information is conveyed to passengers through display boards and public announcement systems. If the servers and cloud systems that store the scheduling information go down, airport operations could grind to a halt.
Many important airport operations happen between the landing and takeoff of an aircraft. Maintenance activities, refueling, safety checks, and more have to be completed while passenger transfers take place. Various air-side and ground-side teams must work together to ensure that the airplane is ready to take off safely as soon as possible. A low-latency, high-availability IT system is necessary for this.
Airport management involves diverse IT systems and requirements, as illustrated in the section above. Your network monitoring solution should be able to monitor all such devices and services and scale up to handle the large volume of data and devices needed in an airport.
ManageEngine OpManager fits the bill. OpManager is a multi-vendor, scalable, end-to-end network monitoring tool that can monitor IT infrastructure components like switches, routers, servers, wireless devices, IoT devices, virtual machines, and printers. OpManager scales up to cover 50,000 devices and 100,000 interfaces smoothly and it has over 10,000 device templates available for out-of-the-box monitoring. This makes OpManager the perfect tool for airport network monitoring.
OpManager is perfect for monitoring aviation networks, which are inherently distributed in nature and often have a large number of components. OpManager can monitor up to 50,000 devices, with the ability to use remote probes to monitor multiple sites from a single server.
OpManager deploys easily and starts monitoring with minimal configuration. With the discovery rule engine, you can create rules to take care of scheduled discovery operations. Moreover, OpManager has over 10,000 device templates, with monitors ready to start monitoring out of the box.
Airport networks experience varying passenger traffic based on the time of day or month. This is reflected in the network traffic as well. OpManager uses AI and ML tools to calculate the expected network activity at a particular time and to set alert thresholds to reflect that value. In essence, OpManager detects abnormal network activity and alerts you about it.
OpManager automatically generates network maps and virtual maps for the devices it monitors. These are updated at set intervals to reflect changes in the network topology. Dashboards are customizable and can be populated with the data of your choice. Moreover, you can create NOC views, CCTV views, and real-time dashboards and can control user access to the dashboards.
OpManager can forecast monitored performance metrics for the upcoming days or weeks. This helps you provision network resources and perform network capacity planning.
OpManager's automated Workflows allow you to automate repetitive tasks with ease. For instance, you can set up a Workflow to run a network ping test or run a DNS lookup on a critical server that goes down.
OpManager lets you to detect network issues and track down their root cause. With root cause analysis, you can compare and correlate metrics collected from your devices to deduce the root cause of issues. Moreover, OpManager has ping tools, a DNS resolver, IP tracking tools, and other troubleshooting tools in its console.
OpManager has over 100 preset report templates covering various aspects of your network, including the availability of all devices, virtual server resource utilization, and WLCs. In addition, you can create custom reports according to your requirements.
Highlands and Islands Airports Limited, or HIAL, is a private company owned by the Scottish government that runs 11 regional airports out of remote regions in Scotland like Inverness, Barra, Kirkwall, and Dundee. Their company values insist on "creating social benefit and economic prosperity by building Scotland's sustainable regional airport group of the future". HIAL's IT team wanted to switch from Solarwinds Orion to a network monitoring tool offering better functionality and an integration with ServiceDesk Plus. They wanted to monitor key metrics such as availability, packet loss, CPU, memory, and disk utilization for their IT infrastructure that included servers, network devices, VMs, and storage devices.
ManageEngine OpManager was the obvious choice. Now the HIAL IT team monitors their airport IT infrastructure of 477 devices distributed over 11 locations with OpManager. OpManager monitors key airport IT systems such as flight information displays, PBXs, radio units, switches, servers, and azure servers. The IT team finds OpManger very much fit for the role, especially because of its clean UI, ability to monitor many vendors using SNMP, monitors for drive space, switch port errors, ability to log tickets with the help desk tool, and so on. The HIAL IT team uses OpManager to support airport management and airport network monitoring.
Monitor multi-core, physical, or virtual CPU utilization for servers used in airport IT networks. OpManager can monitor the CPU utilization of most monitored devices using protocols or APIs.
Monitoring wireless systems is of utmost importance in airport network monitoring. In this case, OpManager is monitoring clients connected to a WLC system.
OpManager provides deep visibility into traffic usage patterns, down to the interface level. This is useful for airport IT teams to detect abnormal events such as DOS attacks and other attempts by bad actors.
Get a complete overview of airport IT infrastructure including alerts, resource utilization levels, compliance, etc. OpManager also has NOC views which helps you perform more efficient airport network monitoring.
Monitor airport networks by visualizing network dependencies, topology, and health. You can also keep track of topology changes as OpManager updates these maps regularly.
Leverage extensive reporting features in OpManager to get better insights about airport network performance. This storage capacity report details capacity of monitored storage devices in OpManager.
Forecasting monitored performance metrics allows you to plan ahead and detect anomalies when they occur. This is especially relevant in airport network monitoring. Here, the network usage for a server is forecast for the remainder of the week.
Correlate collected metrics from multiple devices and track down the root cause of common network issues. Root cause analysis is beneficial in airport network monitoring where fault identification and resolution has to be quick.
Monitor WAN links on a hop-by-hop basis to track down nodes causing slowness and eliminating the causes. Airport network monitoring teams can monitor WAN links between different locations, websites, and services.
Airport management and airport network monitoring go hand in hand. To ensure that critical IT systems run properly, you need oversight and visibility. This is what OpManager provides with its comprehensive, end-to-end monitoring of your aviation network components. Join our family of over one million IT admins by downloading OpManager, or try a free, 30-day trial!
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