Incident Investigation and Remediation Questions

Focuses on systematic investigation methodology and the distinction between immediate mitigation and long term prevention. Topics include collecting and preserving evidence, establishing a reliable timeline, identifying affected systems, performing root cause analysis, containment versus remediation, and documenting findings. Covers basic digital forensics principles and chain of custody, techniques for reducing blast radius and restoring service as a short term response, and planning permanent fixes to prevent recurrence. Also addresses privacy incident investigation practices such as interviewing stakeholders, assessing regulatory and compliance implications, timeliness and documentation requirements, remediation planning, and using post incident analysis to improve processes and controls.

MediumTechnical

71 practiced

A monitoring alert shows large outbound traffic from several hosts and a customer reports sensitive files appearing online. As SRE on-call, walk through the immediate containment steps you would take to reduce blast radius and restore service while preserving forensic evidence. Include CLI/network actions, temporary ACLs, feature flag toggles, and guidance on what to snapshot or capture first.

MediumTechnical

89 practiced

Explain how SLOs and error budgets should influence incident prioritization and remediation investment. Provide a concrete example where an SRE team's error budget burn rate determines whether to pause feature development and focus on reliability work.

MediumTechnical

82 practiced

Explain how you would perform Root Cause Analysis (RCA) on a recurring outage using both the '5 Whys' technique and causal graphs/fault-tree analysis. Show how you would derive actionable, prioritized fixes from each method and how you'd verify that your fixes remediate the true root cause rather than symptoms.

EasyTechnical

85 practiced

Define 'blast radius' in the context of distributed systems and give three concrete, actionable strategies SREs can use at runtime to reduce blast radius. Provide short examples such as network segmentation, rate-limiting, and feature flags and describe when each is most appropriate.

MediumTechnical

71 practiced

Evaluate the trade-offs between taking a compromised host offline for full forensic analysis versus performing live analysis while it remains in production. Discuss evidence preservation, contamination risk, service availability, the risk of attacker escalation, and legal/regulatory considerations that influence your choice.

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