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 are the 'three pillars of observability'?
Answer: Logs, metrics, and traces
The three pillars of observability are logs (event records), metrics (numeric measurements over time), and distributed traces (request flows across services).
What is Prometheus primarily used for in a DevOps environment?
Answer: Collecting and storing time-series metrics with a pull-based model
Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system that scrapes metrics from instrumented targets at defined intervals and stores them as time-series data.
What is Grafana used for?
Answer: Visualizing metrics and logs from data sources like Prometheus in dashboards
Grafana is an open-source visualization and analytics platform that connects to data sources like Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and CloudWatch to create dashboards.
What is an SLO (Service Level Objective)?
Answer: A target reliability or performance goal for a service, expressed as a measurable metric
An SLO is an internal reliability target (e.g., 99.9% availability) that teams use to guide engineering decisions and prioritize reliability work.
What is an 'error budget' in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)?
Answer: The permissible amount of unreliability remaining before an SLO is violated
An error budget is 100% minus the SLO — if your SLO is 99.9% availability, your error budget is 0.1% downtime per period.
What does MTTR stand for in incident management?
Answer: Mean Time to Recovery — average time to restore service after an incident
MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery) measures the average elapsed time between a system failure and full service restoration, indicating incident response effectiveness.