NA05 - RCA - November 26, 2023

Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on November 26, 2023.
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.

Affected Products 

HEP NA05

Event Timeline

Service interruption was experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the HEP NA05 instance during the following hours: 

November 26, 2023 from 05:09:00 AM until 05:33 AM Seattle time: During the event the service was partially available. 

Root Cause Analysis

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

During routine maintenance, which is designed to be seamless, an unintended misconfiguration occurred, leading to the Solr cluster's unexpected disruption.

Immediately after noticing the issue, the Exl Libris cloud engineers restarted the Solr clusters, and the system went back to normal.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• A thorough review of procedures and configurations was conducted, ensuring that similar incidents are avoided in the future.

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.