RefWorks - RCA - November 19, 2020
Introduction
This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis of the RrefWorks service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on November 19th, 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 RefWorks website was unavailable and some customers experienced a service outage during the following hours:November 19th, 2020 from 7:00 AM until November 19th, 2020 09:44 AM US Pacific time.
During the event, the following service had data issues:
- RefWorks Citation Manager
Root Cause Analysis
Ex Libris Engineers investigated this event to determine the root cause analysis with the following results:
There was an unexpected failure in RefWorks Citation Manager proxy machines that required manual restart of 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:
- Add monitoring to the server to prevent this from happening 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.