Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on October 18, 2016

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 theAlma EU00 instance at the Europe Data Center during the following hours: 

October 18, 2016 from 3:55 PM unyil 4:09 PM Amsterdam timezone

During the event, the service was unavailable for the environment.

Root Cause Analysis

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

We have found that a bug created an exceptionally high transactions rate, resulted in an Oracle connection pool exhaustion on all of our application servers. 

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• The identified bug was immediately fixed and the system returned to normal operation.
• In order to further reduce the likelihood of similar impact in the future, we will increase (double) the connection pool size in the upcoming maintenance window.

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/