Legacy RefWorks - RCA - July 1, 2020

Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis of the legacy RrefWorks service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on July 1st, 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:

July 1^st, 2020 from 1:45 PM until 2:25 PM UTC.
During the event the Legacy RefWorks service was unavailable.

Root Cause Analysis

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

The Legacy RefWorks server stopped working after Shibboleth configuration updates. The new updates were not encoded 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 development team worked quickly to bring the service to work

• The development team is adding 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.

Publication History