Alma CN01 - RCA - September 21, 2020

Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on  September 21, 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 CN01 instance at our Chinese Data Center during the following time period:

September 21st, 2020 from 21:40 PM until 22:20 PM Beijing time.
During the event, the service was unavailable for the environment.

Root Cause Analysis

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

Due to a high load on the datacenter storage device caused by a non-optimized running job that resulted in a performance issue.

Ex Libris engineers are working to optimize the job and to run it during less busy hours to reduce the load.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

A new and much stronger storage device has been purchased and will be integrated in the data center.

We are working to expedite this integration and deployment.

Customer Communication

ExLibris 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