Enterprise Operations & Incident Management Topics
Large-scale operational practices for enterprise systems including major incident response, crisis leadership, enterprise-scale troubleshooting, business continuity planning, and recovery. Covers coordination across teams during high-severity incidents, forensic investigation, decision-making under pressure, post-incident processes, and resilience architecture. Distinct from Security & Compliance in its focus on operational coordination and recovery rather than preventive security.
Remote Support and Tools
Covers providing technical support to users and systems through remote methods and the tools and processes that enable that work. Candidates should be able to describe experience with remote access methods such as remote desktop utilities and secure shell access, remote support platforms and screen sharing, and communication channels including chat, telephone, and video conferencing. The topic includes working with ticketing and incident management systems, prioritization, updating and documenting tickets, escalation procedures, clear handoffs, and follow up. It also assesses troubleshooting techniques and diagnostics used remotely, use of logs and monitoring data, and approaches to guiding users step by step while troubleshooting over phone or video. Security and auditability are central, including secure access practices, session logging, credential handling, least privilege, and compliance with policies. Finally, candidates may be asked about automation and scripting used to diagnose or remediate issues remotely, how they choose tools for different scenarios, and examples of challenging incidents they resolved using remote support workflows.
Continuous Improvement and Process Excellence
Demonstrate initiative and ownership in identifying opportunities to improve support processes, reduce manual toil, and increase operational efficiency. Good answers cover how to discover improvement candidates using metrics, design and pilot automations or tooling, improve runbooks and documentation, measure results using indicators such as mean time to resolution or incident frequency, and scale successful changes while collaborating with engineering and cross functional partners. Emphasize a data driven and iterative approach to process excellence.
Troubleshooting and Root Cause Analysis
Methodical approaches to diagnosing and resolving incidents and failures in production systems. Topics include data gathering using logs metrics and traces, forming and testing hypotheses, isolating components and reproducing failures, using diagnostic tools, temporary mitigations and rollbacks, implementing permanent fixes, communicating with stakeholders during incidents, and conducting post incident reviews to prevent recurrence.
Escalation Process Design and Management
Designing and managing escalation protocols and workflows that ensure timely resolution and surface systemic issues. Key aspects include defining what types of issues escalate and at which thresholds, mapping escalation levels and responsible roles, setting escalation timelines and service expectations, routing and handoff procedures, communication and documentation standards, tracking and reporting to prevent escalations from getting stuck, integration with incident and problem management processes, using escalation data to identify training gaps product issues or process failures, conducting root cause analysis, establishing feedback loops and continuous improvement, and coordinating stakeholders to ensure clear ownership and accountability.
Alerting Strategy and Incident Response
Design alerting strategies and incident response practices that turn observability signals into actionable operations. Topics include alert design and classification, threshold versus anomaly detection, preventing alert fatigue, escalation and on call flow, runbook and playbook design, integrating alerts with incident management, post incident review and blameless postmortems, and how monitoring and observability feed incident detection and mean time to resolution improvements. Includes designing alerts for different domains and thinking through what runbooks and context to provide to responders.
System Monitoring and Maintenance
Covers foundational practices for keeping production systems healthy and reliable. Includes proactive and reactive support strategies, system and infrastructure monitoring tools, log management and event analysis, backup and disaster recovery planning, patch and release management, capacity planning, scheduled preventative maintenance, and incident response workflows. Candidates should understand what operational metrics and log signals indicate system health, how to configure alerts and dashboards, how to perform root cause analysis from logs and traces, and how to prioritize and apply updates and fixes to minimize downtime and business impact.
Systematic Troubleshooting Frameworks
Cover structured methodologies and mental models used to diagnose technical problems. Topics include hypothesis driven debugging, the OSI model for network issues, client server troubleshooting patterns, log correlation, performance profiling, isolating variables, hardware diagnostics, and transitioning from symptom mitigation to durable root cause fixes. Candidates should be able to explain when and how to apply each technique.
Complex System Troubleshooting and Incident Diagnosis
Tests systems thinking and approaches for diagnosing problems that span multiple components services layers or domains and present multiple related symptoms. Candidates should show how they map interdependencies prioritize which symptoms to address first generate and test hypotheses correlate telemetry across logs metrics and traces and distinguish root causes from secondary effects. The topic includes using instrumentation and monitoring to isolate failures reproducing issues in controlled environments understanding cascading failures and failure modes across networking storage database and application layers and applying mitigations rollbacks or fixes while minimizing user impact. Candidates should also describe incident communication documentation and post incident analysis to prevent recurrence.
Scope and Escalation Decision Making
Addresses judgment about operational scope and when to escalate issues. Candidates should demonstrate understanding of support and incident boundaries, how to document attempted remediation, criteria for escalating to higher tiers or external vendors, and how to communicate scope and next steps to stakeholders. Emphasis is on clear decision making, documentation, and appropriate escalation paths.