Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Primo service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on January 21, 2020.

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 Primo MT APAC01 instance at the APAC Data Center during the following hours: 

January 21st, 2020 from 8:26 AM until 9:26 AM Singapore time

During the event, the service was unavailable for the environment.

Root Cause Analysis

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

As a result of an earlier maintenance activity for changing Time Zone on the servers that included a server restart, the indexer process ran multiple times.

Once user traffic began to build up during business hours, it created more and more DB sessions and this resulted in DB overloaded which caused the event.

Ex Libris engineers identified and performed a restart to part of the environment components to bring it back to full functionality.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• Additional procedures and monitoring have been set up for the scenario of server restart, to identify such cases of the indexer process starting up multiple times.
• Our engineers are working on a fix to prevent such duplicate processes to be created.

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/