Monitoring, Logging & Incident Response Flashcards
7 cards from real CDM practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Monitoring, Logging & Incident Response flashcards as text
A Kubernetes pod is restarting repeatedly. Which kubectl command provides the most direct view of recent container log output and previous crash logs?
Answer: kubectl logs --previous
`kubectl logs --previous` retrieves logs from the last terminated container instance, essential for diagnosing crash-loop causes.
Which OpenTelemetry signal type is best suited for recording a discrete event that occurred at a specific instant, such as an exception being thrown?
Answer: Log
Logs in OpenTelemetry represent timestamped records of discrete events, making them ideal for capturing exceptions and state changes.
What is the purpose of a 'runbook' in incident response operations?
Answer: Step-by-step documented procedures for diagnosing and resolving known incident types
Runbooks provide on-call engineers with pre-defined, step-by-step instructions for handling specific alert conditions or failure scenarios.
In PagerDuty or Opsgenie, what feature ensures that if the primary on-call engineer does not acknowledge an alert within a set time, it automatically notifies the next person?
Answer: Escalation policy
An escalation policy defines the ordered chain of responders and timeouts so unacknowledged alerts automatically escalate to backup on-call personnel.
Which statistical metric is most useful for understanding the worst-case latency experienced by a small percentage of users, such as the slowest 1% of requests?
Answer: P99 latency
P99 latency captures the 99th percentile response time, revealing tail latency that affects 1% of users — often the most impacted or VIP segment.
A DevOps team wants to detect when a cron job has silently stopped running. Which alerting pattern is designed specifically for this scenario?
Answer: Dead man's switch (heartbeat alert)
A dead man's switch fires an alert if it stops receiving an expected periodic signal, detecting silent failures like a cron job that simply never runs.
What does MTTD stand for in SRE and incident management contexts?
Answer: Mean Time to Detect
MTTD (Mean Time to Detect) measures the average time between when an incident begins and when the team first becomes aware of it.
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