Incident Response or Debugging Story Questions
Prepare 1-2 concrete stories about a time you debugged a system problem, diagnosed a root cause, or helped respond to an incident. Include what went wrong, how you approached it, what tools you used, and what you learned.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
What are the essential elements of an on-call runbook for a critical service? Provide a short structured checklist that a first responder should follow (detection, mitigation, escalation, verification, cleanup).
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
When debugging a distributed request latency increase, how do you choose between investigating logs, metrics, and traces? Provide a concrete example of the order in which you'd use them and what each reveals.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Describe a time you used network packet captures (tcpdump/wireshark) to diagnose an incident such as excessive retransmissions, MTU issues, or asymmetric routing. Explain what you looked for in packets and how that led to the solution.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
During a major incident executives request frequent updates. How would you structure incident updates to both technical teams and non-technical stakeholders to keep everyone informed without overloading the incident responders?
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You detect a major outage that started immediately after a deploy. Walk through the incident response steps: mitigation to restore service, establishing incident roles and communication channels, collecting evidence for RCA, and structuring a blameless postmortem.
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