Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers.
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 Higher-Ed Platform EU00 instance at the Amsterdam Data Center between Sept 12, 2022, from 22:29 until 22:51 Amsterdam time.
 

During this time frame Primo VE was unavailable.  

Root Cause Analysis

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

An in-depth investigation done by Exlibris engineers revealed a software issue in Primo VE, one of the methods which supports crawlers was implemented as a singleton thus a single problematic record caused all threads to hang and eventually to system down.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

·       During the event all front-end nodes were restarted to restore normal service

·       A software fix was applied on EU00 instance on the night of Sept 13, 2022, to prevent this from reoccurring

·       The software fix will be deployed worldwide in Oct release

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.