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# System prepended metadata

title: My first postmortem

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#  My first postmortem - ALX
### Issue summary
The issue arised due to the server having default timeout making it inaccessible when a client tries to communicate with it.

### Timeline:
- 2023–07–04, 6:00 AM EAT: Project release
- 2023–07–04, 9:00 AM EAT: Begin project.
- 2023–07–04, 9:20 AM EAT: Everything working fine. Goes to a 30 mins break
- 2023–07–04, 9:50 AM EAT: I try to reach my server using curl, i received status unreachable. Ping returns destination unknow.  
- 2023–07–04, 10:00 AM EAT: Logged in the ubuntu server and went over to check nginx status logs only to note that the web server was down.
![1612762327197](https://hackmd.io/_uploads/S1FUXI0mT.png)


### ROOT CAUSE AND RESOLUTION
After analysing the error nginx error logs,I realised that the server had slept due to 20 mins of inactivity. This made the error when a client tried to communicate with it. I had to create a puppet script that would start a cron job to allow ensure that the web service is active every 15 mins to avoid such a down time.

### Corrective and preventative measures:
At the time of this downtime, only one web server was serving the site constituting a single point of failure (SPOF). Hence, a good preventive measure and recommendation will be to use a load balancer to distribute the traffic on multiple servers to prevent a total downtime when one server is down.

> Thank you for reading my article.