Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on August 22, 2022.
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 Alma NA02 instance, CZ and the premium sandboxes of NA04, NA05, NA06 and NA07 during the following hours: 

August 22, 2022 from 13:42  until 14:33 CDT: During the event, the service was unavailable.

Root Cause Analysis

Ex Libris engineers investigated this event to determine the root cause of this issue and concluded the following:

The service disruptions occurred due to an unexpected Server HW issue, resulting in a failure of the HEP NA02 DataBase which eventually caused a system down.

Unfortunately the recovery during the attempts to restart the DB server was not optimal and interrupted the service of other environment due to a human error.  

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• Improve hardware failure recover procedures

• Improve hardware monitoring

• Follow-up with the hardware vendor to analyze root cause of the failure

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.