Practice Test Geeks(SRE) Site Reliability Engineering Foundation Certification Practice Test
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On-Call Practices & Runbooks Flashcards

7 cards from real SRE practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.

Read the first 7 On-Call Practices & Runbooks flashcards as text

  1. What is the primary purpose of an escalation policy in on-call rotations?

    Answer: To define who gets paged when the primary on-call does not respond

    An escalation policy ensures incidents are not dropped by automatically notifying backup responders when the primary on-call fails to acknowledge.

  2. Which metric best measures the quality of an on-call experience for engineers?

    Answer: Number of actionable alerts versus total pages received

    A high ratio of actionable to total pages indicates alert quality; noisy, non-actionable alerts degrade on-call quality and engineer wellbeing.

  3. A runbook step says 'restart the service if latency exceeds 2 seconds.' This is an example of what type of runbook content?

    Answer: Remediation step

    A remediation step prescribes a corrective action to take once a problem condition is identified.

  4. What does 'runbook drift' refer to in SRE practice?

    Answer: Runbooks that become outdated as the system changes

    Runbook drift occurs when documentation is not updated alongside system changes, causing instructions to become inaccurate or misleading.

  5. Which practice best reduces cognitive load for an on-call engineer during an incident?

    Answer: Pre-writing runbooks with clear, numbered steps for known failure modes

    Pre-written runbooks allow engineers to follow a structured response plan rather than improvising under stress, significantly reducing cognitive load.

  6. In a follow-the-sun on-call model, what is the main advantage?

    Answer: On-call responsibility transfers between regional teams to align with business hours

    Follow-the-sun rotations hand off on-call duty across time zones so engineers respond during their normal working hours, reducing night-time pages.

  7. What should happen immediately after an on-call engineer acknowledges a page?

    Answer: Begin triage by assessing impact and consulting the relevant runbook

    Acknowledging a page stops escalation timers, and the next step is triage — understanding impact scope and starting runbook-guided diagnosis.