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.

Effected Products  

HEP EU05

Event Timeline

Service interruption was experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the Higher-Ed Platform EU05 instance at the Frankfurt Data Center between:

September 8, 2024, from 00:16 until 00:37 Frankfurt time.

During the event, 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:

The EU05 instance experienced downtime due to an activity taken by the Ex Libris engineers  team on a database server.

The activity was necessary, but did not follow the proper approval procedure and customer communications as required.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• Ensure all activities follow the correct procedure, including customer communications and approval cycles.

• Improve communication channels to ensure all activities requiring approval are clearly identified and communicated.

• Refresh engineers’ knowledge about change management procedures to prevent future occurrences.

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.