Royal Caribbean
Royal Caribbean serves up fun at sea with Cisco Full-Stack Observability
Key benefits
Accelerated MTTR by 50%, decreased critical incidents on Tier 1 applications
Avoided $1M per hour in downtime costs with real-time insights
Eliminated DevOps silos, achieved 100% increase in developer productivity
For Royal Caribbean, every day is Black Friday and delivering delightful experiences is essential. Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes keep operations running optimally to deliver flawless customer experiences at every touchpoint – from booking to check-in and onboard activities to checkout.
“Using Cisco AppDynamics in the development cycle promotes Shift Left practices to find issues in the software delivery process sooner."
Alice McElroy
Director of Operational Excellence,
Royal Caribbean Group
Challenge
Move to automated, real-time insights with full visibility across applications and IT infrastructure to proactively resolve performance and availability issues and prevent downtime that could cost $1M every hour.
Solution
With Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes and managed services with NTT, Royal Caribbean replaced siloed monitoring with automated full-stack observability to proactively identify and resolve issues and deliver the best customer experience even during its busiest times.
Results
Royal Caribbean can now get ahead of issues to deliver flawless customer experiences in the midst of high daily demand, achieve greater productivity among teams, and avoid costly downtime.
“Cisco Full-Stack Observability has helped improve our developer’s productivity at Royal Caribbean almost 100 percent.”
Alice McElroy
Director of Operational Excellence, Royal Caribbean Group
“Through our deployment and managed services with Cisco Full Stack Observability, our goal is to empower our customers to be successful with the investments they’ve made.”
Joe Maissel
Practice Director, NTT
Challenge
The story: Delivering top notch experiences
When you think about Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (Royal Caribbean Group), what’s the first thing that comes to mind? To most of us, it’s probably visions of ocean views, umbrella drinks, and plenty of sunshine. But to Alice McElroy, director of operational excellence at Royal Caribbean Group, she’s focused on one thing. As she puts it, “We sell experiences, not cruises. We’re always trying to ensure that our guest experience is top notch." Achieving “top notch” experiences means there’s no room for any type of system failure or bottleneck.
That’s why she was drawn to Cisco Full-Stack Observability, a solution that helps customers enhance application performance, optimize resources, and strengthen security.
McElroy says, “There were a number of things that drove our interest in implementing full stack observability. Customers were telling us when our systems were down. We didn’t know the system was down, but they knew. We also knew just because a system was up 99 percent of the time it didn’t mean our customers’ experience at the website was good 99 percent of the time.”
So, McElroy says Royal Caribbean needed to get a better understanding of the touchpoints between the customer going into the website, and for instance, making a search, and their journey all the way down to the server.
“There were a lot of points of failure,” says McElroy, “and we needed to tune and understand those points of failure.”
Real-time visibility: The value of Cisco Full-Stack Observability
To understand where to focus within their tech stack, Royal Caribbean turned to Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes, which are part of Cisco’s broader full stack observability solution.
It’s a solution that solves the end-to-end service visibility challenge by providing deep insights into every dependency and every transaction of a complex digital service delivery supply chain. That type of visibility has helped Royal Caribbean gain valuable insight into its business operations.
McElroy says, “The value that AppDynamics and ThousandEyes have brought to us managing the call center, for example, is that I now have full-stack observability, not only from the application experience, but also visibility across the network experience. Now, I see everything. I see all the touchpoints and the failure points that are causing bottlenecks. With these real-time analytics, I know how many bookings are happening, and these insights are available because we're using Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes.”
When it comes to website operations, Alex Oliva, Manager eCommerce Operations, Royal Caribbean’s E-commerce team, says the ability to see everything has already paid big dividends. Oliva states, “Analytics and metrics are the stars for us. We had an issue with the business journey for customers in the United Kingdom, and we were able to validate the issue, then graph exactly when and why the problem started. These are complex scenarios with different symptoms, so being able to query exactly what we need to know is a big win.”
“Our culture has changed. We went from being a reactive type of organization to a proactive, preventive organization.”
Alice McElroy
Director of Operational Excellence,
Royal Caribbean Group
The fact that Royal Caribbean had an appetite to truly understand the analytics piece of its network puzzle was music to the ears to long-time Cisco partner, NTT, the global services provider on the project.
“We were pleased that Royal Caribbean paid such close attention to the analytics piece,” says Joe Maissel. “When they were able to see exactly what was happening with a view into critical business functionality, it provided real value to them.”
The results: A cultural shift
While Cisco Full-Stack Observability has helped McElroy enhance the experience for customers, the results of the implementation have been equally beneficial for her team. McElroy says, “Our culture has changed. We went from being a reactive type of organization to a proactive, preventive organization.”
She adds, “We used to work off spreadsheets and do an operational checkpoint, and each team would say by their gut how they felt the system was doing. Now, we not only know the health of our systems, but we also have visibility into business transactions, enabling us to build trend analysis on retention rates and the booking funnel. With Cisco solutions, we’re data driven.”
“The value that AppDynamics and ThousandEyes have brought to us managing the call center, for example, is that I now have full-stack observability, not only from the application experience, but also visibility across the network experience.”
Alice McElroy
Director of Operational Excellence,
Royal Caribbean Group
Cisco Full-Stack Observability improves team productivity
“Cisco Full-Stack Observability has helped improve our developer’s productivity at Royal Caribbean almost 100 percent,” says McElroy. “In this day and age where developers are responsible for not only developing the solution, but also supporting the solution, they still just want to spend their time developing. Now, they’ve integrated monitoring into the development cycle, so they know how the system is going to perform before it goes live. When we do go live, they get to spend more time developing and less time supporting a broken system.”
Not only that, but McElroy says, “Since the implementation of the Cisco AppDynamics platform, we’ve reduced our mean time to resolution (MTTR) by 50 percent. We’ve also decreased the number of critical incidents, which means increased uptime. And, as everyone knows, downtime equals lost revenue.”
Royal Caribbean, Cisco and NTT: A valued partnership
McElroy is not only pleased with Cisco Full-Stack Observability, but she also says she values how the partnership with NTT and Cisco helped Royal Caribbean improve the guest experience for its customers.
“We focused together on our challenges and on the solutions that would mean positive changes for our customers. Because of this shared commitment, I believe in the solution we implemented, but most importantly, I believe in our partnership.”
Maissel agrees, saying, “Through our deployment and managed services with Cisco Full Stack Observability, our goal is to empower our customers to be successful with the investments they’ve made. It’s been rewarding helping Royal Caribbean get to where they are and partnering with them on where they want to go.”
"We sell experiences, not cruises. We’re always trying to ensure that our guest experience is top notch. Achieving ‘top notch’ experiences means there’s no room for any type of system failure or bottleneck.”
Alice McElroy
Director of Operational Excellence,
Royal Caribbean Group
About Royal Caribbean
Royal Caribbean Group is one of the leading cruise companies in the world with a global fleet of 60 ships traveling to more than 800 destinations around the world.
About NTT DATA
NTT DATA has over 150 years of technology innovation and contribution to society. NTT DATA provides services that improve people’s lives and lead to clients’ success. Learn more about full-stack observability from NTT.
Resources
View all resources
Application Performance Monitoring
AppDynamics APM provides unmatched clarity for complex application environments, getting business-critical information to the right person, in the right context, at the right time.
Achieving end-to-end visibility with Cisco AppDynamics and ThousandEyes
How to bring application observability and network intelligence together with ease.
Unlocking end-to-end observability: Cisco’s game-changing solution
Integrating network intelligence and application observability, our latest Customer Digital Experience Monitoring enhancement enables end-to-end visibility and eliminates silos.
Empower customer digital experience and application dependency monitoring with Cisco Full-Stack Observability
Bi-directional integration of Cisco AppDynamics and Cisco ThousandEyes.