⏱️ The Badge That Took 20 Seconds (And What We Did About It)

#Monitoring #RootCause #Healthcare

At Atrium Health, a nurse pulled me aside and said, “Visitors are getting angry at the kiosk.” I asked why. Her answer? “The badge printer is taking 20 seconds per person. It's jammed? Buggy? No clue.”

In test? It printed in 2 seconds. In staging? Same. Only production was lagging — and only with real user traffic.

Getting Serious with Dynatrace

I deployed Dynatrace OneAgent on the production kiosk. Within hours, I had visibility into:

• Transaction traces of each badge print event
• Network latency between kiosk, printer, and backend APIs
• Database calls fired during check-in

Turned out, a redundant API call was re-checking photo eligibility — even for returning guests — triggering slow DB joins and increasing I/O usage.

“This is the first time someone actually showed us what’s happening behind that kiosk screen.” — Onsite Director, Atrium Health

The Fix (and the Follow-Through)

I worked with engineering to patch the API logic: bypass unnecessary lookups for known visitors. We also cached eligibility responses at the edge. Result? 20-second waits dropped to under 3 seconds.

But I didn’t stop there. I helped define Dynatrace dashboards for:

• Live check-in performance by hospital wing
• Average badge print latency over time
• Error rate breakdown by integration

SE Takeaways

• Logs are great — but traces tell the full story.
• Being onsite reveals friction you’ll never see remotely.
• A patch is good. A dashboard is better.

I’ve never looked at a “Print Badge” button the same way since.