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.
HardTechnical
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Hard: Two downstream services disagree about whether a transaction succeeded (service A logs success, service B logs failure). As SRE, how do you compute a reliable SLI for end-to-end success rate? Propose reconciliation rules, authoritative sources, and instrumentation changes to reduce future inconsistencies.
MediumTechnical
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Medium: How would you test the SLI measurement code in CI? Describe unit, integration, and contract tests you would write for the component that ingests events and emits SLI aggregates.
HardTechnical
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Hard: How would you implement cross-team accountability for error budget consumption across a large microservices platform? Describe tooling, ownership model, reporting, and how to handle disputes when a team challenges attribution.
HardTechnical
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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?
EasyTechnical
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Provide an example error budget policy for an API with an SLO of 99.9% availability over a 28-day window. Include actions at three thresholds (e.g., caution, enforce, stop releases), responsibilities, and escalation path. Be specific about time windows and stakeholders.
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