Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on June 3rd, 2019

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 the Alma instances at our European Data Center during the following time period:

June 3rd, 2019 from 01:45 PM until 02:35 PM Amsterdam time

During the event, Ex Libris Cloud identity service was unavailable. Users that their authentication is done via the university identity service were not impacted.

Root Cause Analysis

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

During planned maintenance at Ex Libris Amsterdam data center, the IDM servers were shut down.
When the servers were brought back online, it was found there is a service issue that had been causing the customer’s login to fail.
Ex Libris engineers fixed the problematic service and restored the service.

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 fixed the issue that caused the servers to not restart properly

• Ex Libris engineers further enhanced the IDM monitoring.

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