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 NA01

Event Timeline

Service interruption was experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the Higher-Ed Platform NA01 instance at the Chicago Data Center, during the following hours: 

January 14, 2025, from 02:25 AM until 03:15 AM CST.

During the event, the service was unavailable.

Root Cause Analysis

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

Three weeks ago an unexpected fault surfaced on a storage device, triggering a defensive read-only state across all data-center applications. Immediate joint analysis with the vendor identified the underlying defect that caused the read-only condition and yielded a recommended remediation. At January 13, early indicators showed the fault was likely to recur, prompting us to schedule the vendor supplied fix as a proactive, preventative measure.

When the solution was finally deployed, it produced a critical failure within the storage device, causing a severe outage that impacted on numerous applications and demanded immediate containment and recovery actions before full service could be reinstated. 

Our engineers quickly understood the magnitude of the event and acted with sense of urgency to restore all applications and environments to normal operation.

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 closely with the vendor to have full technical analysis of the event, that covers the entire spectrum of the event and have permanent final solutions.

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.