Interview questions in Monitoring & SRE, page 7
First-SRE 90-day plan at a startup
Listen and measure first, pick one high-impact service, define SLIs/SLOs and basic alerting, then show reduced toil or incidents to leadership.
OpenTelemetry agent and gateway architecture
Agents run per-node for local collection and host enrichment; gateways are central, horizontally scaled pools for batching, tail sampling, and routing.
Key roles in incident response
Incident Commander coordinates and decides but does not fix; Communications Lead handles stakeholders; Operations/SMEs do hands-on diagnosis and remediation.
Breaking tunnel vision during an incident
Call out the assumption, ask for disconfirming evidence, list parallel hypotheses, split responders to investigate them, and anchor on what changed and the data.
Safeguards for automated remediation runbooks
Add rate limits and circuit breakers on restarts, escalate to humans after N attempts, log all actions, and check for cascading failure before acting.
Automating actions on error budget burn
Use multi-window burn-rate alerts; on fast burn, auto-trigger actions like halting deploys, rolling back, or scaling, with escalating tiers.
Managing a risky release with feature flags
Deploy code dark behind an off flag, enable for internal then small percentage, monitor metrics, ramp gradually, then remove the flag.
Designing a feature flagging service
Control plane (UI, store, targeting), SDKs that cache flags locally for zero-latency evaluation, streaming/CDN delivery for near-real-time updates, and stale-flag lifecycle tooling.
Capacity planning for distributed stateful systems
Account for replication and cross-region network, IOPS and disk throughput, connection limits, partition/shard balance, and N+1 region failover headroom; validate with load and chaos…
Capacity planning for a distributed cache
Track hit ratio, memory and eviction rate, throughput/latency, and connections; correlate with growth to forecast when to add capacity before the hit ratio or evictions…
Federating reliability ownership to product teams
Build a self-service reliability platform (golden paths, paved roads), train teams and embed SLO/on-call practices, and govern with standards plus error budget…
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