Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on Alma CN01

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 CN01

Event Timeline

Service interruption was experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the Alma CN01 instance at the Chinese Data Center during the following hours: 

May 6h, 2024 from 09:55 AM until 05:00 PM Beijing time.

May 7h, 2024 from 10:00 AM until 12:00 PM Beijing time.

During the event, customers experienced slowness in the environment.

Root Cause Analysis

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

Due to a non-standard load on our network, our bandwidth was fully utilized and created a slowness for our customers at the Chinese Data Center. The non-standard load source has discovered as an external crawling scanning our datacenter's URL. The firewall blocked it as expected but it still impacted our bandwidth which is relatively small . In order to prevent this from happening, we blocked the relevant IPs from the ISP side.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• We are working with our ISP provider on expanding our bandwidth in the data center.

• We are adding additional monitoring on our internet lines that will alert us ahead of full utilization.

  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