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    New and Legacy RefWorks - RCA - October 4, 2021

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    Introduction

    This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the downtime of Refworks experienced by RefWorks customers on October 04, 2021.

    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 and identify preventive measures we are taking to avoid similar cases in future.

    Event Timeline

    The Refworks website and writing tool add-ons exhibited data accessibility issues. This affected all RefWorks customers during the following hours:

    October 04, 2021 from 05:35 PM until 07:36 PM US Pacific time.

    During the event, the following services had data issues:

    ·         (new) RefWorks - some functionality was unavailable

    ·         RefWorks Citation Manager (RCM)

    ·         RCM - Hangul

    ·         Write-n-Cite

     

    Root Cause Analysis

    RefWorks engineers investigated this event to determine the root cause analysis with the following result:

    A service degradation and downtime were due to an unexpected load on Refworks API servers,

    as an immediate action Ex Libris engineers stopped the process and redeployed the servers

    Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

    • Adding monitoring to the job
    • Investigating the process to fix the issue (in process)

    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.