SRE Toil Reduction & Elimination 2

Question 1

An SRE team spends 30% of their time manually restarting crashed microservices. Which automation approach BEST eliminates this toil?

Accepted Answer

Implement liveness probes and automatic pod restarts in Kubernetes

Answer

Liveness probes with automatic restarts fully automate the detection and remediation, eliminating the manual toil entirely.

Question 2

What distinguishes 'overhead' from 'toil' in the SRE framework?

Accepted Answer

Overhead has lasting value but no direct production impact, while toil is repetitive manual work scaling with service growth

Answer

Overhead refers to administrative work (meetings, HR tasks) that has organizational value but doesn't scale with service load, unlike toil which grows proportionally.

Question 3

A team's on-call rotation handles 50 alerts per week, 80% of which are auto-resolved before engineers investigate. What should be the FIRST step?

Accepted Answer

Silence the alerts that always auto-resolve and add automation to handle them

Answer

Alerts that consistently auto-resolve without human action are pure toil — they should be automated end-to-end or suppressed with automated remediation.

Question 4

Which metric BEST measures the impact of a toil-reduction initiative over time?

Accepted Answer

Percentage of engineering time spent on toil before and after automation

Answer

Tracking the percentage of engineering time consumed by toil directly measures whether the initiative is freeing engineers for higher-value work.

Question 5

A runbook step says 'run this SQL query monthly to archive old records.' How should an SRE classify and address this?

Accepted Answer

Classify as toil and automate with a scheduled cron job or database maintenance policy

Answer

Repetitive manual tasks with predictable triggers are classic toil regardless of frequency and should be automated away.

(SRE) Site Reliability Engineering Foundation Certification Practice Test

(SRE) Site Reliability Engineering Foundation Certification Practice Test

SRE Toil Reduction & Elimination 2