Monitoring Interview Questions
10 questions
Monitoring interview questions on metrics, alerting design, and telling the difference between an alert that's actionable and one that's just noise.
How does multi-window burn-rate alerting actually work mathematically — what does "burn rate" mean precisely?
AdvancedSREPrometheus8 min
How would you set an initial SLO for a service that has no historical performance data to base it on at all?
IntermediateSRE6 min
How would you handle an SLO breach caused by a shared dependency affecting multiple services at once?
AdvancedSRE7 min
Your on-call team is getting paged 40+ times a week and starting to ignore alerts. How would you redesign the alerting strategy to fix that without missing real incidents?
AdvancedPrometheusMonitoring10 min
Your monitoring currently only checks whether an external health-check endpoint returns 200 OK. What's missing, and how do black-box and white-box monitoring actually complement each other?
IntermediateMonitoring6 min
A team added a 'user_id' label to a metric to debug a specific customer's issue, and now your Prometheus instance is running out of memory and queries are timing out. What happened?
AdvancedPrometheus8 min
Your team has 40 Grafana dashboards, and during the last incident nobody knew which one to actually look at first. How would you fix this dashboard sprawl?
IntermediateMonitoringGrafana6 min
You need to track request latency percentiles across your fleet. When would you use a Prometheus Histogram versus a Summary metric type, and why can't you just average a Summary's percentiles across instances?
AdvancedPrometheus7 min
A dashboard using rate() on a counter metric shows a value that doesn't match what you'd expect from doing the math manually. What's actually going on, and when should you use rate() versus increase()?
IntermediatePrometheus6 min
Your Prometheus storage costs are growing unsustainably from keeping raw-resolution metrics for a year. How would you design a retention and downsampling strategy to control costs?
AdvancedPrometheus7 min