Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on November 15, 2016

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 NA02 instance at the North America Data Center during the following hours: 

November 15, 2016 from 8:34 AM until 9:07 AM Chicago Time Zone

The event was identified using the 24x7 monitoring systems. The event lasted 33 minutes in which slowness was expirienced. During the event, there were 4 minutes of system unavailability.

Root Cause Analysis

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

As a result of a short network disconnection that was identified by Alma, the system automatically initiated a recovery process involving Alma’s Full Text engine recovery process. The recovery process caused a heavy load on the system resulting in performance issues.

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 is taking steps to add corrections to  the application and limit the resources the recovery processes will be allowed to use. This will allow both normal work and recovery to work to work in parallel without any impact.

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