DevOps Monitoring & Observability

Question 1

What are the 'three pillars of observability'?

Accepted Answer

Logs, metrics, and traces

Answer

The three pillars of observability are logs (event records), metrics (numeric measurements over time), and distributed traces (request flows across services).

Question 2

What is Prometheus primarily used for in a DevOps environment?

Accepted Answer

Collecting and storing time-series metrics with a pull-based model

Answer

Prometheus is an open-source monitoring system that scrapes metrics from instrumented targets at defined intervals and stores them as time-series data.

Question 3

What is Grafana used for?

Accepted Answer

Visualizing metrics and logs from data sources like Prometheus in dashboards

Answer

Grafana is an open-source visualization and analytics platform that connects to data sources like Prometheus, Elasticsearch, and CloudWatch to create dashboards.

Question 4

What is an SLO (Service Level Objective)?

Accepted Answer

A target reliability or performance goal for a service, expressed as a measurable metric

Answer

An SLO is an internal reliability target (e.g., 99.9% availability) that teams use to guide engineering decisions and prioritize reliability work.

Question 5

What is an 'error budget' in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)?

Accepted Answer

The permissible amount of unreliability remaining before an SLO is violated

Answer

An error budget is 100% minus the SLO — if your SLO is 99.9% availability, your error budget is 0.1% downtime per period.

DevOps Practice Test

DevOps Practice Test

DevOps Monitoring & Observability