Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Primo service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on May 13, 2017

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 NA03 instance at the North America Data Center during the following hours: 

May 13, 2017 from 15:13 until 20:16 Chicago timezone

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:

A rare and complex network issue resulted in a network traffic routing issue which caused a failure in our backbone infrastructure.

Due to the uniqueness and complexity of the problem, it required Ex Libris and Cisco engineers to conduct a thorough analysis of the 
entire network environment in order to determine the root cause of the failure. 
Ex Libris engineers had to do manual intervention that included system restart to ensure that both the network and applications were functioning properly.
 

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• The components of the network that caused this outage were immediately replaced with new ones.
• An analysis of all the network settings and configuration was conducted in order to verify the network’s stability and integrity.
• As a preventive measure, Ex Libris will continue to review this issue together with Cisco to see what possible preventive actions can be taken in order to avoid similar cases 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/