CDM Monitoring, Logging & Incident Response 5

Question 1

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

Accepted Answer

EMERGENCY

Answer

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

Question 2

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

Accepted Answer

Utilization, Saturation, Errors

Answer

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

Question 3

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

Accepted Answer

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

Answer

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

Question 4

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

Accepted Answer

rate()

Answer

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

Question 5

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

Accepted Answer

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

Answer

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.

(CDM) Certified DevOps Master Practice Test

(CDM) Certified DevOps Master Practice Test

CDM Monitoring, Logging & Incident Response 5