Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Higher-Ed Platform service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on November 24, 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 NA04, NA05, NA06 and NA07

Event Timeline

Service interruption was experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the HEP NA04, NA05, NA06 and NA07  instances during the following hours: 

November 24, 2021 from 00:09  AM until 00:57 AM Seattle time: 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 a maintenance activity by an Internet provider, the Internet line from our Datacenter in Kent, Seattle went down.

Immediately after noticing the issue, the Exl Libris cloud engineers failed over to the secondary internet provider to bring the datacenter 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:

• Work with the ISP to create a better communication flow for such activities
• Improve the automatic ISP failover mechanism to reduce the downtime in future ISP maintenance activities

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.