Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the 360 service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on November 24, 2021.
The goal of this document is to share our findings regarding the event, specify the root cause analysis, outline actions to be taken to solve the downtime event, as well as preventive measures Ex Libris is taking to avoid similar cases in future.

Event Timeline

Service interruption was experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the Alma instances in the Seattle Data Center during the following hours: 

November 24, 2021 from  00:09 AM until 00:57 AM Seattle time

During the event, the services were unavailable.

Root Cause Analysis

Ex Libris engineers investigated this event to determine the root cause of this issue and concluded the following:

Due to a maintenance activity by an Internet provider, the Internet line from our Datacenter in Kent, Seattle went down.

Immediately after noticing the issue, the Exl Libris cloud engineers failed over to the secondary internet provider to bring the datacenter back up.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

Ex Libris has taken the following action and preventive measures to avoid such an occurrence in future:

• Work with the ISP to create a better communication flow for such activities
• Improve the automatic ISP failover mechanism to reduce the downtime in future ISP maintenance activities