Incident Response Coordination Questions

Covers the skills and practices required to lead and coordinate operational incident response and communications across technical and non technical stakeholders. Includes running incident calls, assigning and managing roles such as incident commander and scribe, triage and prioritization, and coordinating escalations to engineering, security, legal, communications, customer facing teams, and executives while balancing security and business continuity. Encompasses crafting and delivering timely, accurate status updates and stakeholder messaging for both technical and non technical audiences, managing expectations, and following escalation protocols and incident runbooks or playbooks to drive resolution. Also covers documenting decisions and actions, reconstructing timelines, producing post incident reports and postmortems, facilitating after action reviews, tracking remediation items, and driving continuous improvement. Tests ability to operate under stress, maintain clear information flow, and coordinate cross functional collaboration to restore service and reduce recurrence.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Implement in Python a function `dedupe_alerts(alerts: List[Dict]) -> List[Dict]` that groups duplicate alerts emitted within a 60-second window where duplicates are defined as matching 'service' and 'error_signature'. Each alert dict has keys: {'service', 'error_signature', 'timestamp' (ISO), 'instance_id'}. Keep the earliest alert as the representative and add a 'count' field indicating grouped duplicates. Aim for O(n log n) or better and explain complexity.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Your service consists of five serially-dependent services (A → B → C → D → E) and the end-to-end availability SLO is 99.95%. Propose how to apportion availability targets across these services, show the math converting per-service availability to an end-to-end SLO, and explain how you would detect which service contributes most to end-to-end failures and how to set per-service error budgets.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain what a Service Level Objective (SLO) and an error budget are. Describe how SLOs and error budgets should influence incident prioritization and give one concrete example where an error budget decision (e.g., rolling back a risky change) would be appropriate during an incident.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Design an incident communication plan that defines channels (Slack, status page, email), cadence (e.g., every 15 minutes for P0), message owners per severity, and templates for customer, internal, and executive updates. Include an escalation matrix for cases where a message owner is not responding.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

You detect anomalous outbound traffic that might indicate data exfiltration during an incident. List the immediate actions to escalate to the security team: what evidence to collect (logs, flows, timestamps), what containment steps you would take that preserve evidence (e.g., network captures vs shutting down hosts), and draft a concise Slack escalation message to security with required context.

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