Monitoring & Observability Flashcards
6 cards from real DevOps practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 6 Monitoring & Observability flashcards as text
What is distributed tracing?
Answer: Tracking a request's journey across multiple services to diagnose latency and failures
Distributed tracing instruments requests with trace IDs that flow through all microservices, allowing developers to visualize the full request path and identify bottlenecks.
What is the ELK Stack?
Answer: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana — a log aggregation, search, and visualization stack
The ELK Stack combines Elasticsearch (search/storage), Logstash (log ingestion/transformation), and Kibana (visualization) to build a centralized logging platform.
What is a 'golden signal' in SRE monitoring?
Answer: One of four key metrics: latency, traffic, errors, and saturation
Google SRE defined four golden signals — latency, traffic, errors, and saturation — as the most critical metrics to monitor for any service.
What is alerting 'noise' in a monitoring context?
Answer: Excessive false-positive alerts that distract on-call engineers from real issues
Alert noise refers to too many low-priority or false-positive alerts that cause alert fatigue, leading engineers to ignore or silence important notifications.
What is OpenTelemetry?
Answer: A vendor-neutral observability framework providing APIs, SDKs, and tools for logs, metrics, and traces
OpenTelemetry is a CNCF project that standardizes telemetry data collection so applications can be instrumented once and send data to any compatible backend.
What is a 'runbook' in incident management?
Answer: A documented set of procedures for responding to specific operational events or alerts
A runbook provides step-by-step instructions for handling a specific alert or operational task, reducing response time and cognitive load during incidents.