Primo EU RCA September 28 and 29, 2015

Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Primo service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on September 28 and 29, 2015.

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 North America instance at the North America Data Center during the following hours: 

September 28, 2015 from 3:00PM until 04:30PM Central Europe time zone
September 29, 2015 from 11:45AM until 12:32PM Central Europe time zone

During these times, Considerable slowness was experienced in the datacenter. The slowness had
affected multiple Primo environments.

Root Cause Analysis

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

A Cross Datacenter slowness was identified. It was found that a configuration on our
Firewall device that causes it to reach 100% CPU.
To solve the issue the wrong configuration were removed and the firewall CPU was
decreased.

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 are working with the PaloAlto vendor to identify the
  possible source of the issue. Once source will be identified – relevant changes
  will be implemented on all devices.
• Additional monitoring had been put in place to identify potential issues on the
  PaloAlto device in order to allow a quicker identification of a problem.

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/