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Timed mock tests and model answers written by working engineers, for every level from fresher to lead. Pick any of our 75 courses below.

Topic: SRE & Observability. Questions are shared by related courses. View the SRE & Observability course → · Follow the Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) roadmap and salary guide →

All SRE & Observability interview questions at a glance+

Fresher (0–3 years): Junior SRE

  1. What are the four golden signals?
  2. You are on call and get paged at 3 a.m. What do you do?
  3. Explain SLI, SLO and SLA.
  4. What are the three pillars of observability?
  5. What is an SLO?
  6. Which tool is commonly used to collect and query metrics?
  7. What does MTTR measure?
  8. A 99.9% monthly availability SLO allows about how much downtime?
  9. What is a p99 latency?

Mid-level (3–8 years): Site Reliability Engineer

  1. How would you define SLOs for a new service?
  2. How would you troubleshoot a latency spike in a microservices system?
  3. How do you reduce toil on your team?
  4. What is an error budget?
  5. Which standard instruments apps for traces, metrics and logs vendor-neutrally?
  6. Alerting on SLO burn rate is better than raw thresholds because…
  7. A blameless postmortem focuses on…
  8. What is toil in SRE?
  9. High-cardinality labels in Prometheus cause…

Experienced (8–15 years): Senior SRE / Reliability Lead

  1. How would you introduce SRE to an organisation?
  2. Plan capacity for a 10× traffic event (e.g. a sale).
  3. How do you measure and improve incident response maturity?
  4. The error budget is exhausted mid-quarter. Policy says…
  5. In large incidents, who should the incident commander be?
  6. Chaos engineering is…
  7. Which architecture limits blast radius?
  8. Controlling observability cost at scale usually means…
  9. The best reliability investment after repeated similar incidents is…