Systematic Troubleshooting and Debugging Questions

Covers structured methods for diagnosing and resolving software defects and technical problems at the code and system level. Candidates should demonstrate methodical debugging practices such as reading and reasoning about code, tracing execution paths, reproducing issues, collecting and interpreting logs metrics and error messages, forming and testing hypotheses, and iterating toward root cause. Topic includes use of diagnostic tools and commands, isolation strategies, instrumentation and logging best practices, regression testing and validation, trade offs between quick fixes and long term robust solutions, rollback and safe testing approaches, and clear documentation of investigative steps and outcomes.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

How would you instrument a long-running background job processing system (workers consuming messages from queues) to make debugging job failures, retry storms, and poison messages efficient? Cover correlation IDs, visibility into retry counts, dead-letter policy, idempotency metadata, and operational dashboards/alerts to detect systemic failures.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Design a plan to detect and remediate a subtle performance regression introduced in the last two releases without impacting customers. Include statistical methods for detection (A/B testing, rolling averages, significance testing), canary deployment strategies, rollback criteria, and detailed steps to root-cause CPU/memory/IO regressions (profiling, perf traces, dependency mapping).

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

A customer reports 'intermittent 502 responses from our API gateway only during peak hours.' Describe a methodical isolation and reproduction strategy you would use as a Solutions Architect: include how you'd create a safe test harness or traffic replay, use feature flags or correlation IDs, how to scope increased logging or sampling, and how to gather required data without increasing customer impact.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Design an observability strategy that unifies logs, traces, and metrics across a hybrid environment (client on-premises data centers plus public cloud). Consider network constraints, secure transport of telemetry, storage locality, sampling strategies, agent vs sidecar architectures, and how to enable cross-environment debugging while meeting compliance and latency requirements.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

What defines a flaky test in CI, why are flaky tests dangerous for reliable debugging, and what practical steps would you take as a Solutions Architect to detect, triage, and reduce flaky tests in a large automated test suite used by your clients?

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