Limited visibility into digital platforms hinders growth and customer experience goals

Founded in Antalya in 1989 as a joint venture between Turkish Airlines and Lufthansa, SunExpress Airlines acts as a tourism ambassador between Türkiye and Europe with over 35 years of experience and leisure airline expertise. Operating flights to 250 routes across 37 countries, SunExpress carries nearly 16 million passengers annually with over 4,500 employees based in Antalya, Frankfurt, Izmir, Ankara, and Dalaman.

In today’s airline industry, digital platforms have become essential tools that manage the entire passenger journey. Websites and mobile apps drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue by offering built-in booking and check-in, real-time updates, and personalized experiences, while also simplifying operations and reducing costs. SunExpress’s website and mobile app serve millions of customers globally, making flawless operation of those platforms critical to the business’s success. Recently, the company developed a new website—a native web application built in-house—and redeveloped its mobile app to bring it into its own environment. The company set an ambitious goal of 99.99% uptime annually.

As SunExpress brought these platforms in-house, it faced a significant challenge. Lack of visibility into performance, real user experience, and the health of critical customer-facing workflows meant teams often learned about issues only after customers were impacted. It also had limited ability to quantify how users were affected by these issues. The company uses numerous third-party SaaS applications, creating a complex ecosystem that is difficult to monitor comprehensively. “We are always exploring new ways on how to further strengthen the quality of our app and online services and reduce downtime,” says Ferdi Türkmen, IT Service Assurance Senior Specialist, who is responsible for reliability monitoring and incident response governance at SunExpress.

To achieve its uptime goals and deliver the digital experience passengers expect, SunExpress needed a unified platform that could provide complete visibility across its entire digital ecosystem.

Unified observability provides visibility across complex digital ecosystem

SunExpress considered building its own observability solution but quickly recognized the challenges that approach would present. “If you have an open source environment, you have to build a lot of different servers and have knowledge about the maintenance. Managing all that would be a challenge,” says Türkmen.

Instead, SunExpress hired a consultant to explore various solutions. The consultant recommended Datadog, and the company launched a proof of concept project with 97 specific technical requirements spanning infrastructure monitoring, application performance, and digital experience across web and mobile platforms. Datadog met all the requirements, leading SunExpress to select the platform.

SunExpress first began using Datadog Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to gain visibility into critical services. The team valued that it was a scalable, manageable solution that provided a single platform for unified visibility across frontend, backend, and infrastructure data. “Having a unified platform is critical,” explains Türkmen. “It helps bring accountability, which is very important to providing good services. If you can’t see what’s happening, you can’t measure, and if you can’t measure, you can’t see if you are performing well or not.”

“Having a unified platform is critical,” explains Türkmen. “It helps bring accountability, which is very important to providing good services.”

Ferdi Türkmen
IT Service Assurance Senior Specialist, SunExpress Airlines

The team used APM to create service level objectives (SLOs) and dashboards for each Tier 1 service. Today, more than 100 people within SunExpress rely on Datadog daily, along with relevant internal stakeholders and authorized partners.

In addition to APM, SunExpress development teams are using Datadog Real User Monitoring (RUM), which proved especially valuable while building the new mobile app. The team relies on RUM to validate mobile user experience and catch user-facing errors before release, with every error generating an email alert to help prioritize fixes before going live.

SunExpress uses Datadog Synthetic Monitoring to validate critical customer-facing workflows, such as booking and check-in, in production. Synthetic tests regularly simulate real user actions and trigger alerts if a flow fails, helping the team detect issues early and track reliability against SLOs.

SunExpress engineers are using Datadog Bits AI SRE to transform troubleshooting processes, enabling faster incident triage and root cause analysis. Today, Bits AI SRE provides guided context so cross-functional teams can triage faster without requiring deep domain expertise. “Before, we would see that something was happening, but we couldn’t tell if it was directly related to the application or if it was related to the network layer or something else,” says Türkmen. “We would have to call our consulting team and get support from them to understand the troubleshooting. With Bits AI SRE, we can do it in a few minutes, and we need fewer consultants.” As a result, the team now has the rich context and guided investigations needed to confidently act on alerts, even without deep development expertise.

“Before, we would see that something was happening, but we couldn't tell if it was directly related to the application or if it was related to the network layer or something else,” says Türkmen. “We would have to call our consulting team and get support from them to understand the troubleshooting. With Bits AI SRE, we can do it in a few minutes.”

Ferdi Türkmen
IT Service Assurance Senior Specialist, SunExpress Airlines

Beyond incident triage, the Service Assurance team actively uses Bits AI Assistant to accelerate day-to-day operational work. It supports the creation of monitors and dashboards and helps improve log parsing and structuring, enabling faster execution and quicker operational outcomes.

Since SunExpress adopted Datadog, the platform has alerted on increased error rates and notification delivery issues, enabling rapid root-cause identification (e.g., slow database queries) and resolution within approximately 30 minutes.

SunExpress increases uptime and accelerates troubleshooting

SunExpress has significantly enhanced the reliability and uptime of its digital platforms. The team now has end-to-end observability, with developers having visibility into application flows, third-party calls, and database dependencies through APM, combined with real user journeys from RUM. Synthetic monitoring further supports this approach by validating critical booking and check-in workflows in production, helping keep these customer-facing journeys available and reliable. This comprehensive view has enabled them to reduce both error count and error rate while gaining deep insights into application behavior and impact.

One of the most significant improvements has been the ability to detect and fix slow queries proactively. “Before Datadog, we could only find slow queries if users informed us about them. Now, I just open Datadog and directly see the root cause. It’s very quick,” says Şevket Evli, Senior Software Architect.

The proactive monitoring capabilities have improved how SunExpress manages its digital platforms. Instead of learning about problems from customer complaints, the team now detects issues through Datadog alerts and resolves them before passengers are affected. This shift from reactive to proactive incident management has been critical to supporting the company’s growth trajectory and maintaining the digital experience passengers expect.

Looking ahead, SunExpress plans to continue to expand the Datadog partnership by growing its use of AI-driven automation to help resolve issues faster and using Datadog Session Replay as part of its RUM adoption to gain additional insights into user behavior and experience. “Datadog has become a core part of our reliability operations, supporting faster detection, triage, and clearer stakeholder communication for customer-impacting services,” concludes Türkmen.

“Datadog has become a core part of our reliability operations, supporting faster detection, triage, and clearer stakeholder communication for customer-impacting services.”

Ferdi Türkmen
IT Service Assurance Senior Specialist, SunExpress Airlines