Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Higher-Ed Platform service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on August 3, 2021.
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

Higher-Ed Platform NA03

Event Timeline

Service interruption was experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the HEP NA03 instance during the following hours: 

August 3, 2021 from 08:57  AM until 09:09 AM PDT: During the event the service was not available.

Root Cause Analysis

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

Due to an OS bug, the environment database server become unresponsive.

Ex Libris engineers received the alert immediately and restarted the DB to bring it back up.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

Ex Libris engineers will update the relevant OS component to mitigate the bug after running a full test cycle of the new version

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.