American Airlines Transforms Observability and Accelerates Delivery with Dynatrace

American Airlines’ mission is to care for people on life’s journey, with a focus on building world-class customer experiences. The airline has a long history of leading the industry through innovation, being the first major carrier to launch a customer loyalty program and to introduce airport lounges. Today, American Airlines is harnessing the power of generative AI to reimagine travel planning for its customers, by enabling them to transform ideas into curated, bookable experiences tailored to their passions and lifestyle.

The technology stack supporting American Airlines’ digital services is built on a diverse infrastructure, spanning Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud services, as well as on-premises hosts and Kubernetes. Previously, the airline used three monitoring solutions for application performance, infrastructure health, and log analytics. It wanted a more modern approach that would drive efficiency by replacing this fragmented toolchain with one unified platform. The goal was to speed up problem resolution by eliminating the need for teams to manually correlate data from various dashboards to identify root cause, as well as reducing the operational overhead and onboarding time of using multiple tools.

American Airlines set out to adopt a unified observability platform that would eliminate these inefficiencies—giving developers, platform engineers, and SREs a shared, real-time understanding of system behavior across services, environments, and AI workloads.

After evaluating the market, American Airlines selected Dynatrace, due to its seamless integration with Microsoft Azure, powerful Grail data lakehouse technology, and OpenPipeline feature. These capabilities enabled the airline to ingest and enrich all critical sources of observability data into one platform, including metrics from Azure and logs from 43 different buckets in Mezmo, its legacy log management tool.

“With all that data now in Dynatrace, we have a single source of truth, so we can visualize problems far more easily when we’re troubleshooting,” said Manuel Gordillo, Senior Observability Engineer, American Airlines.

“Taking that a step further, we use Dynatrace Intelligence to surface insights in real time, helping engineers identify anomalies, trace failures across services, and understanding system behavior before issues impact customers. That saves a huge amount of time, helps us control costs, and enables us to deliver better customer experiences.”

• AI leadership: Dynatrace enabled American Airlines to bring its new ‘Travel inspiration with AI’ tool to market much faster, to help customers curate new travel experiences through a natural language interface. The ability to ingest log data from Azure AI Foundry and use Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) to surface insights into token costs, LLM calls, failure rate, and response time gave internal stakeholders confidence to accelerate the rollout of the new AI-powered feature.

• Accelerated innovation: The automated discovery capabilities in Dynatrace mean that American Airlines can deploy observability much faster than before, without the need for manual instrumentation. As a result, development teams can accelerate delivery of new applications and services to the business by ensuring they are observable by default.

• Faster resolution: The insights from Dynatrace have been a major contributor to American Airlines’ ability to reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) issues in its environment by 50% over 12 months. By giving teams a single source of truth about the precise root cause of issues, they no longer need to switch between different tools to piece together insights and can collaborate more effectively to resolve them faster.

• Reduced burden: By consolidating three monitoring tools onto one unified platform with Dynatrace, American Airlines has been able to reduce the cognitive load for its engineering teams significantly. Now, they no longer need to learn how to master three different tools or spend time switching between dashboards to find answers – Dynatrace has everything they need in one place.

“Dynatrace means that instead of having to go all over the place to figure out that there’s something wrong, our teams have a single source of truth that helps them focus on what they need to do to get our customers out of impact,” said Adam Barrow, Principal Solutions Architect, American Airlines. “As we develop new AI features, apps, and functionality to support the airline, the ability to install Dynatrace as a ‘batteries included’ part of our ecosystem has a massive impact on time to market. We’re ready to go from the off, because we no longer have to common bootstrap various tools to observe different parts of our infrastructure.”

To learn more, watch the American Airlines session from Dynatrace Perform 2026 here.