DOL Metrics and KPIs 3

Question 1

What does a 'toil' metric measure in the SRE and DevOps context?

Accepted Answer

Manual, repetitive operational work that scales with service growth

Answer

Toil is manual, repetitive, automatable work that grows proportionally with service traffic, and reducing it is a key SRE objective.

Question 2

A DevOps leader sees high deployment frequency but rising MTTR. What does this combination most likely indicate?

Accepted Answer

Deployments are frequent but insufficiently tested, causing more incidents

Answer

Deploying often while MTTR rises suggests quality gates are weak — incidents are happening more often and taking longer to resolve.

Question 3

Which leading indicator would a DevOps leader monitor to predict future deployment failures before they happen?

Accepted Answer

Test coverage trends and flaky test rate

Answer

Declining test coverage or rising flaky test rates are leading indicators that code quality is degrading and production failures are more likely.

Question 4

What is the relationship between 'lead time for changes' and team cognitive load in DevOps?

Accepted Answer

Long lead times often indicate large batch sizes that increase cognitive load and risk

Answer

Long lead times typically reflect large, complex batches of change that are harder to understand, review, and roll back — all of which raise cognitive load.

Question 5

A DevOps team uses 'cycle time' as a KPI. What does cycle time measure?

Accepted Answer

Time from work item started to production delivery

Answer

Cycle time measures from when work is actively begun (picked up from backlog) to when it reaches production, reflecting end-to-end delivery speed.

(DOL) DevOps Leader Practice Test

(DOL) DevOps Leader Practice Test

DOL Metrics and KPIs 3