SRE On-Call Escalation and Runbook Design 2

Question 1

What is the 'follow-the-sun' on-call model, and what are its primary benefits and challenges?

Accepted Answer

Follow-the-sun distributes on-call coverage across geographically distributed teams in different time zones so that each team handles incidents during their business hours, reducing after-hours pages; the main challenge is handoff quality and context continuity

Answer

Follow-the-sun coverage ensures on-call engineers are never paged during their night by handing off responsibility as business hours shift around the globe — but requires excellent incident handoff processes to prevent information loss during transitions.

Question 2

What is 'alert routing' in incident management, and why is it important to route alerts to the RIGHT team?

Accepted Answer

Alert routing directs each alert to the team with the knowledge and access to resolve it, reducing time-to-acknowledge and preventing incidents from sitting in an un-monitored queue while being routed to the wrong team

Answer

Routing alerts to the wrong team wastes critical response time — the team that receives the alert may spend time just figuring out who owns the service, delaying diagnosis and remediation.

Question 3

A runbook step says: 'Check if the issue is in the database or application layer.' What makes this a POOR runbook instruction?

Accepted Answer

It is vague and non-actionable — a good runbook instruction would specify exactly which commands to run, which metrics to check, and how to interpret the results to make the determination

Answer

Vague instructions require domain knowledge that a stressed, sleep-deprived on-call engineer may not have at 3 AM. A good runbook specifies exact commands, expected outputs, and decision criteria so the procedure can be executed mechanically.

Question 4

What is 'context-sensitive escalation' and how does it improve on simple time-based escalation?

Accepted Answer

Context-sensitive escalation considers the severity, service type, and current conditions (e.g., high-traffic event, recent deployment) to escalate differently depending on context — a high-traffic event may trigger faster escalation than a normal business day

Answer

Simple time-based escalation ('escalate if unresolved after 30 minutes') is inflexible. Context-sensitive escalation adjusts escalation urgency based on incident severity, business context (peak traffic periods), recent changes, and affected user tier.

Question 5

What should a runbook include for an 'escalation decision tree' to be effective?

Accepted Answer

Clear decision points based on observable conditions (e.g., 'if mitigation not found in 20 min OR user impact >10%'), explicit escalation targets by name/role, contact information, and what information to share when escalating

Answer

An effective escalation decision tree removes ambiguity: the conditions for escalation are observable facts (not judgment calls), the escalation target is specific (not 'the database team'), and the information to communicate is specified (not assumed).

(SRE) Site Reliability Engineering Foundation Certification Practice Test

(SRE) Site Reliability Engineering Foundation Certification Practice Test

SRE On-Call Escalation and Runbook Design 2