Cathay Pacific cut operational noise ~30% by unifying observability on Elastic Cloud

Rajeev Nair, General Manager of IT Infrastructure & Security at Cathay Pacific, explains how the airline moved off self-managed monitoring to Elastic Cloud, unifying telemetry on one Elasticsearch data layer. Booking and payment are now watched as end-to-end business transactions, not just servers — cutting operational IT noise by about 30% and giving infrastructure and security teams a shared view across 300+ applications. Before the change, infrastructure and security teams watched different tools in different data formats, so every incident started with the same unproductive question: is this an infrastructure problem or a security problem? Self-managed, on-prem systems meant constant patching and hardware maintenance, static logging didn't fit a containerized world, and monitoring only showed CPU and memory symptoms rather than business outcomes — with 5–6 major incidents a day and mean time to recovery running 4+ hours. Cathay Pacific moved 98% of its applications off legacy infrastructure, including mainframe reservation and ticketing systems, and standardized on Elasticsearch as one data and search layer, so infrastructure and security teams could look at the same data while asking different questions. The result: booking, payment, and inventory are now monitored as end-to-end business transactions, surfacing issues before they reach the passenger. Topics covered in this video: - Why watching infrastructure symptoms wasn't the same as watching the business - Moving 98% of applications off legacy, self-managed infrastructure - Centralizing logging onto a single Elastic Cloud data layer - Monitoring booking, payment, and inventory as real business transactions - What's next: staying model-agnostic on AI and moving toward recommended actions, not just signals Chapters: 0:00 - Meet Rajeev Nair, Head of IT Solutions at Cathay Pacific 0:30 - The old problem: 4+ hour mean time to recovery 1:02 - Building centralized logging capabilities 1:50 - Clear visibility into critical business functions Additional Resources: Learn more about Elastic Observability: https://www.elastic.co/observability Learn more about Elastic Security: https://www.elastic.co/security #ElasticSearch #ElasticObservability #ElasticSecurity #customertestimonial