SLIs, SLOs, SLAs Definition and Implementation Questions
Understanding Service Level Indicators (SLIs - what you measure), Service Level Objectives (SLOs - targets you set), and Service Level Agreements (SLAs - commitments to customers). At senior level, design SLOs that align with business requirements and user expectations. Choose meaningful SLIs like availability, latency, error rate. Understand how SLOs drive reliability decisions, allocation of engineering effort, and error budgets. Design monitoring to track SLI achievement. Address multi-tiered SLOs for different service tiers or customer segments.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain the difference between synthetic monitoring and real-user monitoring (RUM). For an e-commerce website, give examples of SLIs you would collect with synthetic checks and SLIs you would collect via RUM, and explain why both are useful.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Hard: A major SLO is being missed due to reliance on a third-party API. Propose short-term and long-term mitigations (technical and contractual), monitoring to validate improvements, and how you'd engage vendor management to change SLAs with the provider.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Design an SLO strategy for a machine learning inference service where the ground-truth labels are delayed by days (e.g., fraud detection). How do you define usable SLIs, detect model drift, and preserve user-facing reliability while labels lag?
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Medium: You are asked to choose SLO targets for a mature service where current availability is 99.7% and product desires 99.99. Describe a data-driven approach to decide whether to raise the SLO immediately, gradually, or to invest in reliability first. Include experiments and guardrails.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Scenario: you want to use canary analysis tied to error budget consumption to drive rollouts. Describe how you'd implement canary evaluation metrics, success criteria comparing canary to baseline SLOs, and decision logic to continue, rollback, or pause a rollout.
Unlock Full Question Bank
Get access to hundreds of SLIs, SLOs, SLAs Definition and Implementation interview questions and detailed answers.
Sign in to ContinueJoin thousands of developers preparing for their dream job.