Legacy RefWorks - RCA - August 5, 2020
Introduction
This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis of the legacy RrefWorks service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on August 5th, 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
The legacy RefWorks website was unavailable and some customers experienced a service outage during the following hours:
August 5th, 2020 from 10:00 AM until 3:50 PM UTC.
During the event the sessions of Legacy RefWorks users become invalid and they needed to login again.
Root Cause Analysis
Ex Libris Engineers investigated this event to determine the root cause analysis with the following results:
Some legacy Refworks databases were accidentally set to “Expired”, which caused loss of connection and invalidation of sessions.
Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures
Ex Libris has taken the following action and preventive measures to avoid such an occurrence in future:
- · The development team has fixed the issue and now all databases are operating normally.
- · The development team has added a validation, so it won't happen again
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.