Refworks - RCA - October 24, 2018

Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the RrefWorks service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on October 24, 2018

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 RefWorks instance at the during the following hours: 

October 24^th, 2018 from 6:05 PM until 6:45 PM US Pacific time.

During the event, the following services was intermittently unavailable:

• Refworks

Root Cause Analysis

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

A defect in one of the database processes caused the database to become unresponsive. As a result, users experienced application performance issues.

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 restarted the environment to resolve the problem.
• Ex Libris will add more monitoring to the database processing.
• Ex Libris will evaluate code to prevent future blockages in the database.

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