Monitoring, Logging & Incident Response Flashcards

Which log severity level in the syslog/RFC 5424 standard indicates a system is unusable and represents the highest urgency?

Answer: EMERGENCY

EMERGENCY (severity 0) is the highest syslog level, indicating the system is completely unusable and requiring immediate action.

A team is implementing the USE method for system performance monitoring. What do the letters U, S, and E stand for?

Answer: Utilization, Saturation, Errors

The USE method (by Brendan Gregg) analyzes Utilization, Saturation, and Errors for every resource to systematically identify performance bottlenecks.

In a blameless postmortem, what is the primary goal of the 'five whys' technique?

Answer: To iteratively ask 'why' to trace from symptoms to root systemic causes

The five whys technique drills past surface symptoms by repeatedly asking 'why' until the underlying systemic or process failure is identified.

Which Prometheus query function calculates the per-second rate of increase of a counter metric over a specified time range?

Answer: rate()

`rate()` computes the per-second average rate of increase of a counter over a time window, smoothing out spikes and handling counter resets.

What is 'log sampling' and when is it most appropriate to use in a high-throughput system?

Answer: Recording only a fraction of log events to reduce storage and processing costs at very high volume

Log sampling records a representative subset of events (e.g., 1 in 100) to manage cost and volume in systems generating millions of events per second.

In incident communication, what is the purpose of a status page (e.g., Statuspage.io) during an active outage?

Answer: To provide transparent, real-time incident updates to external customers and stakeholders

A status page gives customers visibility into ongoing incidents and current service health, reducing inbound support volume and maintaining trust.

Which approach to on-call scheduling rotates responsibility weekly so that every team member shares the operational burden equally over time?

Answer: Round-robin rotation

Round-robin rotation cycles on-call duty through all team members in a fixed sequence, distributing the operational burden equitably.