Incident Response and Runbook Design Questions

Covers the design and operation of incident response programs and the creation and maintenance of actionable runbooks and playbooks for production systems. Candidates should be able to explain the incident lifecycle from detection and classification through investigation, escalation, remediation, and post incident analysis. Topics include severity definitions and assessment, escalation procedures, team roles and responsibilities, communication protocols during incidents, on call rotations, alert triage, and coordination across teams during outages. Also includes designing automated remediation steps where appropriate, integrating runbooks with monitoring and alerting systems, maintaining playbooks for common failure modes such as malware, data exfiltration, denial of service, and account compromise, and conducting blameless post incident reviews and continuous improvement. Candidates should be able to discuss metrics for measuring response effectiveness such as mean time to detect, mean time to repair, and response success rate, and describe approaches to improve those metrics over time.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Provide a concise example runbook step for service degradation when database query CPU utilization exceeds 90%. The step should include the detection query/alert, the immediate remedial action (one command or action), verification steps (queries/thresholds), expected outcome, and clear escalation criteria for contacting the SRE on-call.

MediumSystem Design

0 practiced

Write a pseudo-runbook (structured, step-by-step) for responding to a volumetric DDoS attack that overwhelms the web tier. Include detection signatures, short-term mitigations (rate-limiting, CDN/WAF rules, provider scrubbing), verification steps to validate mitigation, responsibilities for communications, and plan for restoring normal traffic flow. Assume you have access to cloud provider DDoS protection APIs.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

How would you integrate forensic evidence collection into operational runbooks for suspected data exfiltration while minimizing service disruption? Describe the order of steps to preserve logs, capture memory snapshots (when necessary), collect network captures, and maintain chain-of-custody, plus trade-offs between uptime and thoroughness.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Name three essential integration points between monitoring/alerting platforms (e.g., Prometheus, Datadog) and runbook systems (e.g., Rundeck, PagerDuty). For each integration point explain what data is exchanged (payload), why it matters, and one implementation consideration (security, idempotency, or latency).

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

What is a blameless post-incident review and why is it important? As a Solutions Architect, outline a structured agenda for a blameless post-incident review for a Sev1 multi-team outage: which artifacts to request beforehand, timing of the review, a sample agenda (timeline reconstruction, root cause analysis, action items), and how to convert findings into tracked engineering work.

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