Ryanair’s Productivity Soars with PagerDuty Automation

Ryanair set the ambitious goal to fly 300 million passengers annually by 2034—creating the exciting challenge of doubling its capacity over the next decade. To scale, the need for an automation platform became imperative to preempt potential disruptions, particularly to avoid flight delays.

Recognizing the magnitude of this endeavor, the airline needed an automation solution that works across infrastructure, data, and incidents—providing a unified orchestration layer to streamline operations at scale.

Inefficiency and Toil Create Turbulence

Engineers at Ryanair were managing tedious, manual tasks. For example, checking if a batch job ended required logging in and checking the logs—every time. It was slow and inefficient. And often, they were interrupted in the middle of a project. “Context switching burns people out,” says Diego Infiesta, Infrastructure Manager at Ryanair. “It’s stressful to leave what you’re working on to address something more urgent.”

The team started automating certain recurring processes to improve operational agility and morale. Assessing if tasks were worthy of automating became a fundamental strategy. For example, how often does the team do this daily? Can we build self-service automation? Can these tasks be delegated safely? These were important questions the team needed to answer to understand the impact automation could have on their greater team.

Over time, the team found success using automation. However, the growing number of automation use cases created its own layer of complexities. The absence of an overarching orchestration framework made it difficult to streamline and scale their automation efforts. “Our main challenge was that we had a lot of small-scale automations running everywhere, but we didn’t have anything wrapping it all together,” says Diego Infiesta, Infrastructure Manager at Ryanair.

Soaring High with PagerDuty Process Automation

PagerDuty Process Automation proved to be a game-changer for authoring, managing, and executing automated workflows that span across teams, technologies, and networks. It seamlessly integrates into Ryanair’s operations and works across its hybrid environment, seamlessly moving data between cloud and on-prem infrastructure. Infiesta says, “Process Automation was so easy to deploy, and we saw the benefits right away.”

Today, PagerDuty facilitates the execution of over 25,000 jobs daily, significantly enhancing operational efficiency. Some notable examples include:

• Disaster Recovery (DR): Ryanair’s DR process is standardized using Process Automation, making it simple to execute the steps without human error.
• Auto-remediation: Self-healing is an important part of Ryanair’s incident response strategy. For example, if a web server stops responding at 3 A.M., an alert trigger goes to Process Automation which will try to restart and fix it. If this doesn’t work, a human will be looped in.
• Security and Compliance: In the past, it took an engineer two weeks to provide all the evidence required for a Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) compliance auditor. Now with Process Automation, Ryanair offers auditors a self-service portal to collect the information they need. This has reduced the amount of time spent on SOX audits by 90%.

The list goes on, automating everything from data downloads to building reports. “Just invest a small amount of time in doing a process that will save you a lot of time down the road,” says Infiesta.

Clear Skies Ahead

With Process Automation, engineers no longer need to manage mundane, time-consuming tasks. The team’s newfound efficiency not only propelled current operations, but also positioned them nicely for future scalability and additional embedding of new automation.

“The benefit of PagerDuty Process Automation for us is that engineers can focus on improvement, training, cloud adoption, and cost optimization,” says Infiesta. “We’re more efficient and more resilient.”

Hear more from Diego in his PagerDuty Connect London presentation including details about why they moved from Rundeck open source to PagerDuty Process Automation, and how they address cultural challenges related to using automation.

To find out how PagerDuty Process Automation can help you automate and delegate business and IT processes, contact your account manager or start a free trial.