Advanced Debugging and Root Cause Analysis Questions
Systematic approaches to complex debugging scenarios: intermittent failures, race conditions, environment-dependent issues, infrastructure problems. Using logs, metrics, and instrumentation effectively. Differentiating between automation issues, environment issues, and application defects. Experience with advanced debugging tools and techniques.
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design an automated RCA assistant that consumes logs, metrics, and traces and suggests likely root causes for incidents based on historical incidents. Describe the system architecture, data labeling strategy, feature extraction, model choices, how to surface ranked hypotheses to engineers, and how to evaluate and iterate the system.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain the practical differences between an OOM (out-of-memory) kill and a memory leak. Which telemetry and logs (OOM killer logs, RSS, heap vs resident set, GC metrics, allocation rates) would you inspect to distinguish them and what time-series patterns indicate a leak versus a transient spike?
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain benefits of structured (JSON) logging over unstructured free-text logs for debugging and RCA. Provide examples of a minimal standardized log schema (timestamp, request_id, service, level, user_id(optional), context) and describe how to index and query those fields for efficient troubleshooting.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Your team's CI pipeline is frequently blocked by flaky integration tests, delaying deploys. As the SRE responsible for platform reliability, draft a remediation plan that balances short-term mitigation (quarantine, retries, flakiness tiers) with long-term fixes (redesign tests, deterministic data seeding, better environment virtualization). Include owner assignments and measurable milestones.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
How would you design and enforce a request-correlation ID across services to enable end-to-end root cause analysis? Cover propagation methods (headers, baggage), sampling interactions, how to handle external/third-party services, and how to query logs and traces using the correlation ID to stitch a full picture.
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