Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on  December 31, 2017

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 EU01 instance at our European Data Center during the following time period:

December 31st,  2017 from 09:24 AM until 09:36 AM Amsterdam time.

December 31st,  2017 from 11:02 PM until 11:48 PM Amsterdam 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:

A network device failure occurred in the backbone infrastructure of the Amsterdam data center, causing high CPU on the network component. 

As a result of this network failure, part of the servers lost their connection to the central storage which caused a short outage and required a reboot.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• All servers and the application were restarted by Ex Libris engineers
• The network device backbone infrastructure issue is being analyzed together with the vendor, in order to enhance configurations and process.
• Ex Libris is working on improving our monitoring tools to allow quicker detection of similar events in future, which will allow faster communication as well.

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.

Publication History