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
68 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.
HardSystem Design
66 practiced
System design: Design an approach to compute a p99 user-visible latency SLI across a geo-distributed microservices architecture using tracing and sampled spans. Describe how you aggregate, avoid bias from sampling, and maintain performance at scale.
MediumTechnical
55 practiced
Case study: Mobile app users report sluggish screens during peak hours. Your p95 backend API latency increased from 300ms to 2s. As SRE, define an SLO for mobile API latency, list the SLIs you'd monitor, outline a troubleshooting plan, and propose short- and long-term mitigation steps.
MediumTechnical
48 practiced
Scenario: You run a multi-tenant service with free, paid, and enterprise tiers. Design an SLO scheme that maps SLIs to tier-specific SLOs, covers per-tenant reporting, and enforces error budgets. Explain measurement, data isolation, and how you would prevent noisy tenants from impacting others' SLOs.
EasyTechnical
101 practiced
As a Site Reliability Engineer, explain the difference between an SLI, an SLO, and an SLA. Provide concrete examples for an HTTP microservice (availability, p95 latency, error rate), state who typically owns each artifact (engineering, product, legal), and describe how they relate to one another in practice.
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