SRE Cheat Sheet 2026

The 30 highest-yield SRE facts, distilled from real exam questions. Print it, save it as a PDF, or study it here — free, no sign-up.

1. Why is post-incident review important? → To analyze the root cause and prevent recurrence
2. Why are postmortems important after incidents? → To learn from incidents and improve systems
3. Which formula correctly expresses the error budget for a 99.9% monthly SLO? → 0.1% of total minutes in the month ≈ 43.8 minutes of allowed downtime
4. What is the primary purpose of using Infrastructure as Code (IaC)? → To automate infrastructure setup and ensure consistent environments
5. What is the purpose of an incident response playbook? → To define and document standard response steps
6. What does SLI stand for in SRE terminology? → Service Level Indicator
7. How does Terraform support IaC practices? → By allowing declarative infrastructure provisioning as code
8. Which tool is commonly used for configuration management in SRE practices? → Ansible
9. Which practice helps reduce risk during changes? → Canary deployments and feature flags
10. Which of the following best describes Infrastructure as Code? → Infrastructure managed using scripts and configuration files
11. Which of the following best describes a key competency required for observability & logging in SRE practice? → Strong analytical skills combined with effective communication and ethical judgment
12. Which tool is useful for tracking incidents and changes? → Jira or ServiceNow for traceability
13. Which of the following best describes a key competency required for on-call practices & runbooks in SRE practice? → Strong analytical skills combined with effective communication and ethical judgment
14. A team defines a latency SLI as 'the proportion of homepage requests served in under 200 ms.' Which SLO statement is BEST aligned with this SLI? → 99% of homepage requests will be served in under 200 ms over a rolling 28-day window
15. What metric represents the frequency of successful system responses? → Availability
16. In the context of SRE certification, what is the most important consideration when implementing release engineering & ci/cd? → Ensuring alignment with established standards, stakeholder needs, and best practices
17. Which metric is most useful for identifying service unavailability? → Error rate
18. Which of the following is an example of a latency metric? → Request response time
19. What is 'alert correlation' in a mature SRE observability platform? → The process of linking multiple related alerts to a common root cause or triggering event
20. Which of the following best describes alert fatigue? → When alerts are ignored due to overexposure
21. In the context of SRE certification, what is the most important consideration when implementing distributed systems design? → Ensuring alignment with established standards, stakeholder needs, and best practices
22. What should a blameless postmortem include? → Technical root causes and future mitigations
23. What is the primary goal of monitoring in Site Reliability Engineering? → To proactively identify and respond to system issues
24. In the context of SRE certification, what is the most important consideration when implementing on-call practices & runbooks? → Ensuring alignment with established standards, stakeholder needs, and best practices
25. What is a typical action during incident triage? → Classify and prioritize incidents based on impact
26. An error budget has been fully consumed three weeks before the end of the quarter. What is the MOST appropriate response? → Freeze all non-critical feature releases and focus on reliability work
27. What is a common drawback of not using automation in infrastructure management? → Increased human errors and inconsistent environments
28. Why are frequent, small changes encouraged in SRE? → They simplify testing and minimize risk
29. In the context of SRE certification, what is the most important consideration when implementing capacity planning & scaling? → Ensuring alignment with established standards, stakeholder needs, and best practices
30. Which of the following best describes a key competency required for chaos engineering & resilience in SRE practice? → Strong analytical skills combined with effective communication and ethical judgment