Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis of the RrefWorks service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on March 26, 2019.

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 Refworks website and writing tools exhibited data inaccessibility issues. This was experienced by all Ex Libris customers served by Refworks during the following hours:

July 5th, 2019 from 12.50 AM until 3.55 AM US Pacific time.

During the event, the following services had data issues:

• RefWorks (new)
• Write-N-Cite
• RefWorks Citation Manager
• RefWorks for Google Docs

Root Cause Analysis

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

An uncommon failure in one of the cloud nodes required manual index restore.

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 did a manual index restore to bring the application to full functionality.
• Ex Libris engineers are working on backup updates, so that future failures will trigger an automatic restore.

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