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System Monitoring and Performance Tuning Questions

Operational monitoring and continuous tuning of system and infrastructure resources to maintain performance and reliability. Topics include key system health and performance metrics such as central processing unit usage memory utilization disk input output and latency network bandwidth process counts system load latency and throughput and queries per second, establishing baselines and normal ranges, anomaly detection and root cause triage, instrumentation and metric collection for system health, reading monitoring dashboards and recognizing common failure patterns, interpreting system logs and using diagnostic commands and tools, setting alert thresholds and prioritization and escalation pathways, capacity planning and remediation steps, resource tuning to remove bottlenecks, and knowing when to escalate to deeper engineering investigation. Candidates should be able to connect observed symptoms to likely causes describe basic troubleshooting workflows and propose mitigation and prevention measures.

HardTechnical
44 practiced
Explain how database connection pooling interacts with database capacity. For a web tier with many app instances, describe common misconfigurations that cause connection storms and propose mitigations such as proxy poolers, connection multiplexing, pool sizing strategies, and architecture changes to reduce DB connection pressure.
MediumTechnical
49 practiced
Describe a log retention policy strategy for services that produce both security-sensitive audit logs and verbose debug logs. Include retention durations, access controls, indexing choices for performant queries, archival strategies, and GDPR or data-protection implications.
HardTechnical
64 practiced
Case study: A video-transcoding backend handles 10k jobs/day with average CPU time 2 minutes and memory 1.5GB per job. Forecasts expect 10x growth in 6 months. Propose a capacity model including queueing, batch sizing, autoscaling or fleet sizing, cost estimation, and monitoring to validate the model during ramp.
HardTechnical
53 practiced
A client asks whether to optimize for performance or cost after seeing high cloud bills driven by monitoring overhead and a large instance fleet. As a solutions architect, present a two-phase plan with short-term tactics to reduce cost without breaking SLAs and long-term architectural investments that balance performance and cost, including quantification approaches.
MediumTechnical
58 practiced
You're seeing periodic transient CPU spikes that do not impact user experience but generate alert churn. Propose a threshold-engineering approach to reduce on-call fatigue while ensuring real incidents are not missed. Include multi-condition alerts, rate-of-change metrics, sliding windows, and refractory periods.

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