SRE On-Call Practices & Runbooks 5

Question 1

What does 'alert fatigue' describe in an on-call context?

Accepted Answer

Desensitization to alerts caused by excessive noisy or false-positive pages

Answer

Alert fatigue occurs when engineers receive so many low-quality or false-positive alerts that they begin ignoring or dismissing pages, risking missed real incidents.

Question 2

Which element should every runbook include to help engineers confirm a remediation worked?

Accepted Answer

Expected system behavior or metrics after the fix is applied

Answer

Verification steps tell the engineer what to check after a remediation to confirm the issue is resolved, preventing premature incident closure.

Question 3

A service has been paging on-call engineers 15 times per shift on average. According to SRE principles, what should be done?

Accepted Answer

Investigate and eliminate the sources of noise through alert tuning or automation

Answer

High page volume indicates poor alert hygiene; SRE practice calls for eliminating noise through tuning thresholds, improving automation, and fixing root causes.

Question 4

What is the main risk of having a single 'super-engineer' who is always on-call for critical systems?

Accepted Answer

Single-person on-call creates a bus factor risk and leads to unsustainable burnout

Answer

Depending on one person creates a single point of failure — if that person is unavailable or leaves, response capability collapses, and the workload causes burnout.

Question 5

What distinguishes a 'playbook' from a 'runbook' in some SRE organizations?

Accepted Answer

Playbooks provide high-level strategy and decision trees; runbooks provide specific step-by-step procedures

Answer

Some teams use 'playbook' to mean a higher-level guide with decision logic, while 'runbook' refers to a specific ordered set of executable steps for a known failure mode.

(SRE) Site Reliability Engineering Foundation Certification Practice Test

(SRE) Site Reliability Engineering Foundation Certification Practice Test

SRE On-Call Practices & Runbooks 5