EU04 - RCA - June 30, 2022

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 EU04 instance at the Frankfurt Data Center between June 30, 2022 from 15:25 until 16:14 Frankfurt time.

During this time frame the service was either slow or unresponsive for the effected products. Primo VE was only mildly affected.

Root Cause Analysis

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

Gradual development of slowness that occurred as a result of high memory utilization at two search engine nodes which eventually resulted in an unresponsive system.

The memory stress developed without any early warning.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

·       The issue was identified by our monitoring systems 15:37 and at that point our engineers started looking for the source of the problem

·       Once the root cause was identified both nodes were restarted to restore stable service.

·       The affected nodes memory was resized within a few hours to prevent reoccurrence.

·       The monitoring has been improved

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.