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 the purpose of a 'dead man's switch' in monitoring?
Answer: An alert that fires when an expected event (like a heartbeat) stops occurring
A dead man's switch (or heartbeat alert) triggers when a periodic expected signal is not received, detecting silent failures like a crashed cron job.
What is 'synthetic monitoring'?
Answer: Simulating user interactions with scripted tests to proactively detect issues
Synthetic monitoring uses scripted, automated transactions to continuously probe critical user journeys and APIs, detecting issues before real users encounter them.
What does P99 latency mean in monitoring?
Answer: The latency value below which 99% of requests fall; the 99th percentile
P99 latency is the 99th percentile — 99% of requests are faster than this value, representing the tail latency experienced by your slowest 1% of users.
What is an 'on-call rotation' in a DevOps team?
Answer: A schedule where team members take turns being the primary responder to production alerts
An on-call rotation distributes the responsibility for responding to production incidents across team members in shifts to prevent burnout.
What is a post-mortem (or post-incident review) in DevOps?
Answer: A blameless analysis of an incident to identify root causes and prevent recurrence
A blameless post-mortem documents the timeline, contributing factors, and action items from an incident to improve systems and processes without assigning blame.
What does 'observability' mean beyond traditional monitoring?
Answer: The ability to understand a system's internal state from its external outputs without prior knowledge of failures
Observability means you can ask arbitrary questions about a system's behavior and get answers from telemetry data, even for failure modes you didn't anticipate.