Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on February 24, 2020

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

Intermediate service interruptions were experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the Alma AP01 instance at our Singapore Data Center during the following time period:

February 24^th , 2020 from 10:45  AM until 11:16  AM Singapore time

During the event,  the service was unavailable for the environment for 12 min. and had degradation in performance for 19 min

Root Cause Analysis

Ex Libris Engineers investigated this event to determine the root cause analysis with the following results:

The disruption was as a result of a high load in DB caused by a specific non-optimized SQL query. In order to quickly resolve the problem, our engineers had to take immediate action to stop the sessions with the problematic query, which in turn caused intermittent service

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• To restore normal service Ex Libris engineers disabled a specific feature for a small number customers who were notified separately.
• The permanent fix will come in March Release Update in which the specific feature will be enabled again for the effected customers.

Customer Communication

Ex Libris is committed to providing customers with prompt and ongoing updates during Cloud events. Ongoing and prompt updates on service interruptions appear in the system status portal at this address: http://status.exlibrisgroup.com/

These updates are automatically sent as emails to registered customers.

Publication History