Observability Fundamentals and Alerting Questions

Core principles and practical techniques for observability including the three pillars of metrics logs and traces and how they complement each other for debugging and monitoring. Topics include instrumentation best practices structured logging and log aggregation, trace propagation and correlation identifiers, trace sampling and sampling strategies, metric types and cardinality tradeoffs, telemetry pipelines for collection storage and querying, time series databases and retention strategies, designing meaningful alerts and tuning alert signals to avoid alert fatigue, dashboard and visualization design for different audiences, integration of alerts with runbooks and escalation procedures, and common tools and standards such as OpenTelemetry and Jaeger. Interviewers assess the ability to choose what to instrument, design actionable alerting and escalation policies, define service level indicators and service level objectives, and use observability data for root cause analysis and reliability improvement.