Easy interview questions in Monitoring & SRE, page 2
Distinguishing toil from necessary ops work
Toil is manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, and scales with growth; engineering and judgment-heavy work is not toil.
Automate temporary elevated database access securely
Self-service request with approval, short-lived auto-expiring grants scoped to least privilege, and full audit logging.
Golden signals for capacity planning
Monitor the four golden signals, latency, traffic, errors, and saturation, from day one, watching percentiles and saturation to forecast scaling.
Load vs stress vs soak testing
Load tests expected traffic, stress pushes past limits to find the breaking point, soak runs sustained load for hours to expose leaks.
What telemetry must a new microservice ship with?
Metrics for trends like p99 latency and error rate, structured logs for per-request detail, traces for cross-service causality.
What is an SLO and how do you define API availability?
SLO is a target on an SLI, availability SLI is good requests over valid requests, you need labeled request counts over a window.
How does chaos engineering differ from other testing?
It experiments on real systems by injecting faults to test a steady-state hypothesis, versus verifying known behaviors like integration or load tests.
What is blast radius and how do you limit it?
Blast radius is the scope of users or systems an experiment can harm; limit it by targeting a small traffic percentage and by having an automated abort.
Design a simple chaos experiment for a cache dependency?
Hypothesis that the service degrades gracefully when Redis is unavailable, monitor error rate, latency, DB load, and cache hit rate.
Defining SLIs and an SLO for an auth service?
Pick user-centric SLIs like login availability and latency, measure good over valid events at the right boundary, then set an achievable SLO with a window.
What is an error budget and how is it used?
The budget is the allowed unreliability (100 percent minus the SLO); track its burn, ship freely when budget remains, and freeze risky changes to focus on reliability when exhausted.
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