Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on January 17, 2017

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 NA03 instance at the  Europe Data Center during the following hours: 

January 17, 2017 from 9:58 AM until 10:06 AM 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:

On January 15^th, during a maintenance window, an activity on the load balancer took place. Following the maintenance activity, Ex Libris identified a misconfiguration on the load balancer. In order to resolve the misconfiguration that impacted several customers, the entire environment had to be taken down for few minutes. 

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

•          Once identified, Ex Libris engineers immediately corrected the misconfiguration.
•          The work procedure for this type of maintenance activity had been corrected to prevent the misconfiguration.
•          Additional test procedures have been added to the work procedures to allow verification following a maintenance activity.

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