Advanced Debugging and Root Cause Analysis Questions

Systematic approaches to complex debugging scenarios: intermittent failures, race conditions, environment-dependent issues, infrastructure problems. Using logs, metrics, and instrumentation effectively. Differentiating between automation issues, environment issues, and application defects. Experience with advanced debugging tools and techniques.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

You have the following simplified timeline for a production failure:\n\n- 10:03 deploy of service X\n- 10:05 errors spike in service Y\n- 10:06 partial rollback attempted\n- 10:10 errors decrease but some clients still see failures\n\nDescribe a stepwise root-cause analysis: what data to collect (logs, traces, metrics), how to correlate events, and how to determine whether the deploy caused the regression or merely exposed a latent bug.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain how a core dump (core file) and a stack trace help debug a crash. Describe practical steps to obtain a core dump on Linux for a crashed process inside a container, and how to map addresses to function names when binaries are stripped or optimized.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Write (or describe in clear pseudocode) a Python tool to merge large distributed traces in JSON-lines format from many services whose clocks are unsynchronized. The tool should detect per-host clock skew by comparing RPC send/receive pairs, adjust timestamps, and compute approximate end-to-end latency per trace while streaming to limit memory usage. Explain algorithms, skew estimation, and complexity.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Explain the differences, roles, and typical usage patterns of logs, metrics, and traces in observability. For each artifact give a concrete example of a bug it best helps diagnose and one limitation of that artifact type.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

In Java, multiple threads increment a shared counter with the following code:\n\n

java\npublic class Counter {\n  private int count = 0;\n  public void increment() { count++; }\n  public int get() { return count; }\n}\n

\n\nIf 100 threads call increment concurrently, describe the bug, why it happens, and provide two correct fixes with trade-offs (show concise code or API choices).

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