Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on September 14, 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

Intermediate service interruptions were experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the Alma NA01 instance at our North America Data Center during the following time period:

September 14, 2019 from 11:08 PM until 11:17 PM Chicago time.

During the event, 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 software memory issue was identified on one the search engine nodes causing some operations to fail for some institutions.
A software correction was made that will prevent this memory issue in the future.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• We decided to do a full system restart in order to restore full service as soon as possible
• Memory was added to the problematic node on the same day
• The code was thoroughly reviewed to identify the malfunction described above and a fixed was rolled out on Fri Sept 20th.

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