RefWorks - RCA - March 26, 2019

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 was slow and some customers experienced a service outage. This was experienced by all Ex Libris customers served by Refworks during the following hours:

Mar 26^th, 2019 from 9.27 AM until Mar 26^th, 2019 9.57 AM US Pacific time.

During the event, the following service was slow and partially unavailable:

·         Refworks 

Root Cause Analysis

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

A spike in CPU usage caused by a high number of slow queries. We restarted the databases and the system recovered.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

·         Put a system in place to identify and kill long running queries

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