Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on HEP AP02.

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.

Effected Products 

HEP AP02

Event Timeline

Service interruption was experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the Higher-Ed Platform AP02 instance at the Sydney Data Center on July 21, 2024 at the following time frame:

From 06:22 until 07:01 Sydney time.

During this time frame there was a service disruption.

Root Cause Analysis

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

As part of regular ongoing activity on the Network devices, an unintentional configuration error occurred, leading to a service interruption.

Ex Libris Network engineers quickly identified the issue, and performed fail over of the Firewall device, and the system fully recovered.

Fail-over took longer than expected with Palo Alto Technical support on the phone helping to speed the process up.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

A thorough review of network failover procedures and configurations was conducted.

A full analysis of the problem was completed by Palo Alto and the Network Engineer and all applied fixes will be completed during the next maintenance window.

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.