At KRUU, Europe’s leading photo booth rental provider, smooth logistics are critical to customer satisfaction. The company’s signature product, a rentable, shippable photo booth for weddings and special events, is central to thousands of celebrations. Once the booth is returned to the warehouse, hundreds to thousands of high-resolution photos are then compiled into shareable online galleries.
But during one busy wedding season, something went wrong.
Michael Lear presents at OpenSearchCon EU 2024
The Challenge: Delays and Invisible Bottlenecks
Fulfillment teams at KRUU’s warehouse began reporting delays that threatened the company’s operational rhythm. What should have been a six-minute photo upload often took more than an hour for some booths. This threatened timely re-shipping for upcoming bookings, risking customer experience and business continuity.
Michael Lehr, Head of Code at KRUU, and his team began investigating. There were no code changes or hardware failures. Test data transferred quickly. Yet production photo booths continued to lag. With no clear source of truth, their only clues came from scattered Slack logs. It turned out the issue began months prior, but because there was no system in place to track or alert on key metrics, it had gone unnoticed.
Eventually, they traced the root cause to a network misconfiguration in a newly rented warehouse. While data moved fine under light load, it collapsed under the simultaneous uploads of multiple photo booths. It was a silent failure that proved impossible to test in advance, but one that could have been detected much earlier with proper observability.
The Solution: Bringing Visibility with OpenSearch
Looking for a better way to monitor their systems, KRUU turned to OpenSearch. Michael’s team already had valuable metrics embedded in their application, they just weren’t doing anything with them.
Using Filebeat, they began feeding these metrics into OpenSearch. From there, they quickly created dashboards that visualized trends like photo booth download speed, helping them detect performance degradation over time. With OpenSearch’s built-in monitor and alert features, they also configured real-time Slack notifications when thresholds were crossed, ensuring they would never again be caught unaware by bottlenecks.
“You can’t test everything, but you should monitor it,” said Michael Lehr. “With OpenSearch, we gained critical visibility into our fulfillment pipeline and were able to resolve issues before they impacted our customers.”
The result was a fully operational observability solution, implemented in just one day.
The Impact: From Firefighting to Forecasting
OpenSearch didn’t just solve one problem; it changed how KRUU operates.
- IT and Operations now use OpenSearch dashboards daily to track booth activity, detect failures much earlier, and manage capacity during peak seasons.
- Marketing and operations teams set up alerts for broken links, failed uploads, or content errors—before customers notice.
- Management gets insights into system performance through easily digestible dashboards.
Thanks to OpenSearch, monitoring is no longer an afterthought, it’s part of KRUU’s foundation for operational excellence.
Watch the full story:
Michael Lehr – You Can’t Test Everything, But You Should Monitor It (OpenSearchCon EU)
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