Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on July 10,2015.

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 NA01 instance at the North America Data Center during the following hours:

July 10, 2015 from 11:05AM until 11:58AM Chicago time zone.

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:

An Oracle defect had caused the database to stop responding. Since the defect did not result in
an overall failure of the Oracle database, the database failover mechanism was not triggered.
Due to this issue, the application servers were unable to establish connections to the database
and stopped responding.
Once identified the database was stopped, and the failover mechanism was triggered. Once the
failover has completed the service returned to normal availability.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• An Oracle Hotfix has been applied to prevent future incidents regarding the
  defect discovered.

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/