Alma NA instances - RCA - October 5, 2016
Confidential Information, Disclaimer and Trade Marks
Introduction
This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on October 5, 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 NA01, Alma NA02 and Alma NA03 instances at the North America Data Center during the following hours:
October 5, 2016 from 10:16AM until 10:23AM 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:
We have identified an infrastructure defect on one of the core switches (hardware element). As a result of the defect, the switch was rebooted. Following that reboot, a failover to the adjacent redundant Core Switch took place, but a miss-configuration on the load balancer had prevented that failover of the load balancer to take place – this has caused the system disruption.
Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures
Ex Libris has taken the following action and preventive measures to avoid such an occurrence in future:
- To prevent future occurrences, the load balancer’s High Availability misconfiguration has been fixed to allow for proper failover
- An in-depth analysis is being done for the load Balancer's High Availability configuration to investigate further optimizations
- Core Switches upgrade option to a firmware version that does not hold the identified defect is being analyzed and an upgrade will be scheduled based on findings
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/