Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on November 5, 2018

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 EU02 instance at our European Data Center during the following time period:

November 5, 2018 from 8:55 AM until 9:40 AM Amsterdam time.
During the event the service was intermittent to the environment

November 5, 2018 from 9:41 AM until 10:07 AM 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:

In order to improve the database performance and following recommendations from the database vendor (Oracle), a gradual implementation of changes to the database was done.
No negative impact was recorded on the environments that this change was done on.

On Alma EU02 the change was done on Sunday (November 4th) with no negative impact.  On Monday, following high traffic in the environment, negative impact was seen and a rollback to the change was done immediately.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• Ex Libris engineers did a rollback to the database change.
• Ex Libris engineers will keep investigating for a solution on database level with Oracle.
• Ex Libris engineers are also looking for other solutions on application level.

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