Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Primo service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on November 5, 2014.

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 Europe Data Center during the following hours: 

November 5, from 20:42 to 22:05 Central European 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:

Ex Libris’ cloud engineers were conducting investigation into a known bug in the Firewall software causing performance degradation. During the investigation procedure a human error triggered an unscheduled firewall failover.

This action caused both redundant firewall appliances to fail and required a manual intervention to reboot the firewalls in a gradual controlled procedure.

Once the manual reboot took place the service was restored.

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 has updated the Firewall troubleshooting procedures imposing stricter control over troubleshooting steps that could be taken outside of the regular maintenance window.
• In order to improve resolution time in cases of network issues requiring manual intervention, Ex Libris is in the process of deploying a new network tool (out-of-band management solution) allowing the cloud engineers to response faster with remote troubleshooting capabilities.

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/