Interview questions in Monitoring & SRE, page 4
Designing a safe chaos engineering exercise
Form a hypothesis, define steady state and blast radius, inject failure, observe response, with abort and rollback safeguards.
Essential sections of a post-mortem
Summary, impact, timeline, root cause, lessons, and owned action items, each with a clear purpose.
The 5 Whys root cause technique
Repeatedly ask why to move from symptom to systemic cause, stop at an actionable systemic fix.
Why blameless culture matters for reviews
Blame causes people to hide facts, so reviews miss systemic causes; blamelessness surfaces honest detail.
Why 'human error' is not a root cause
Human error is a starting symptom; ask why the system allowed it, find missing guardrails.
Resolving post-mortem disagreement with data
Anchor the debate in the timeline, deploy events, traces, and metrics; correlate cause and onset; allow multiple contributing factors.
Proximate cause versus root cause
Proximate cause is the immediate trigger, root cause is the systemic condition that allowed it; fix the root to prevent recurrence.
Fixing an unmanaged post-mortem action backlog
Generate fewer, higher-leverage items targeting systemic risk; assign owners and dates; integrate into normal planning with explicit prioritization.
Measuring post-incident review effectiveness
Track action-item completion and age, repeat-incident rate, time-to-publish, and MTTR trend.
Reviewing a large-scale cascading outage
Dedicated facilitator, cross-team timeline reconciliation, map cascade chains and multiple contributing factors, layered action items.
Automating a recurring manual cache clear
Recognize the repetitive manual task, document the runbook, then automate it into the deploy pipeline as a post-deploy hook with monitoring.
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.
Idempotency in infrastructure provisioning scripts
Idempotency means repeated runs converge to one end state; achieve it via desired-state reconciliation or idempotency keys with read-before-write.
Systematically reduce noisy alert toil
Inventory alerts, measure frequency, actionability, and time cost, then prioritize by volume times effort.
Design automated microservice provisioning workflow
Template scaffolding plus a pipeline that creates repo, CI/CD, and infra as code, with idempotent steps and rollback.
Design a centralized auto-remediation platform
Event ingestion, a rules engine mapping alerts to playbooks, a sandboxed execution runtime, and guardrails like dry-run, rate limits, and rollback.
Measure ROI of toil reduction efforts
Track toil hours, percent of time on toil, incidents auto-resolved, and engineer cost saved, then frame as ROI and risk reduction.
Blue-green deploys with schema migrations
The shared database means both versions hit one schema, so breaking changes must be split into backward-compatible steps via expand-and-contract.
Diagnose a degraded canary release
Check statistical significance versus baseline, confirm apples-to-apples comparison, isolate the cause via traces and logs, then weigh the regression against SLO budget.
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