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   

Alma, Primo VE, Leganto, Esploro, Rialto, Rapido

Event Timeline

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

•  Between Oct 2, 2024, from 14:12 until 14:24 Chicago time - During this time frame the service was unavailable for all Effected Products

•  Between Oct 2, 2024, from 16:40 until 17:20 Chicago time - During this time frame Primo VE was unavailable

Root Cause Analysis

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

A misconfiguration within the consortia for a particular customer led to transactions entering a continuous loop. This issue escalated as the number of looping threads increased, ultimately resulting in a service disruption that affected all customers and operations. Upon identification, the misconfiguration was promptly corrected, and normal service was restored.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• Introducing monitoring system to detect consortia misconfigurations.

• Modifying the consortia configuration interfaces to prevent potential misconfigurations.

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.