United Airlines achieves 75% fewer major incidents with Dynatrace

United Airlines runs in an environment that never stops. Every day, millions of travellers rely on its digital services to book flights, check in, board aircraft, and stay connected throughout their journey. Delivering these experiences requires a technology platform operating at extraordinary scale.

To achieve this mission, United has been investing heavily in digital capabilities that optimize the customer journey, including next-generation inflight connectivity. The technology that underpins its operation is vast. For example, it takes over 2,000 applications and services to get an aircraft off the ground, and even a boarding pass triggers 500 unique services to load on a mobile device. United Airlines’ customer-facing applications support more than 6 million mobile and web sessions every day.

Powering those operations at scale required United to connect modern cloud-based services to long-established systems. As the company approached its 100th year, it was managing significant technical debt and needed to maintain legacy platforms alongside modern architectures. United needed a way to see the entire ecosystem end to end and enable teams to understand issues quickly, prioritize them effectively, and keep mission-critical services running reliably for the business and its customers.

United Airlines needed a single platform that could replace hundreds of fragmented monitoring tools and provide consistent insight at scale. It selected Dynatrace to become the foundation for unified observability at United due to its ability to connect digital performance data with business events, to give teams a shared view. This level of knowledge helped teams solve issues before they impacted customers, dramatically improving their experience.

“Running an airline means operating in an environment that never stops,” said Ramiro Zavala, Head of IT Operations and Observability, United Airlines. “Combined with nearly a hundred years of history, we’ve end up with a very complex technology landscape. We have cloud platforms, on-prem systems and mainframe all working together. Before Dynatrace, we relied on multiple tools and manually piecing information together. Dynatrace gave us a way to see how everything connects, end to end, across the entire ecosystem.”

• Improved reliability: With Dynatrace, United has improved operational resilience, delivering its highest levels of reliability two years in a row. The airline has achieved a 75% reduction in overall major incidents over five years and a mean time to resolution (MTTR) reduction of over 30%. Teams can now understand how technology issues impact business KPIs such as booking conversion, digital check-in completion, and on-time departures and arrivals, so they can prioritise action that improves reliability.

• Greater operational efficiency: United drove unified observability at scale by consolidating events, traces, and logs into one platform. This approach helped teams reduce the need to manually correlate telemetry from more than 800 applications across different tools, enabling faster problem diagnosis and clearer accountability across complex service dependencies.

• Enhanced collaboration: United paired its tools consolidation drive with a deliberate focus on people and execution. The team drove a transformational change in culture, supported by initiatives such as observability developer days and Dynatrace blitz months. This helped teams think differently about how Dynatrace could help them to improve their working practices, so they could move away from constantly chasing what was breaking and spend more time building.

• Higher customer satisfaction: Dynatrace helped United shift from monitoring IT signals to optimizing business outcomes by transforming observability data into actionable insights. United feeds business observability data from Dynatrace into Digital Control Tower dashboards that enable its teams to understand how issues are impacting critical KPIs, rather than focusing on technical symptoms. This has reduced business impact time by 35%, which has contributed to United becoming the number one airline for arrivals and departures, and achieving its highest ever NPS scores.

“Dynatrace fundamentally changed how we operate,” continued Zavala. “We’ve achieved our strongest reliability ever, and that’s because we can clearly understand impact and act on it faster. Instead of spending time reacting to issues, our teams are focused on building and improving the customer experience. Dynatrace has also helped to change the way we talk about IT operations internally and enabled stronger collaboration across the business. That shift has been incredibly powerful.”