Senior Software Engineer Mock Interview
Practice 47 Senior Software Engineer interview questions covering system design, architecture decisions, and technical leadership.
Question 8 of 47
Describe for me some of the techniques you use to monitor the performance of your software.
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William Swansen has worked in the employment assistance realm since 2007. He is an author, job search strategist, and career advisor who helps individuals worldwide and in various professions to find their ideal careers.
A senior software engineer's responsibility for the performance of the programs they develop extends beyond the initial launch. You and your team are responsible for monitoring the software, determining if it is performing to specs, and modifying it if necessary. The interviewer seeks to hear that you understand this responsibility and the techniques and methodologies you use to accomplish it.
William Swansen has worked in the employment assistance realm since 2007. He is an author, job search strategist, and career advisor who helps individuals worldwide and in various professions to find their ideal careers.
"My team and I need to continue to monitor the performance of our programs after they are put into production. We accomplish this using several different tools which monitor the program's performance. The information these tools collect is then placed into a graph to see which factors are impacting the program's performance the most. This ensures that the programs perform as they were designed to and provides us feedback for our design methodologies and how well they function in the real world. Items we look at include processor speed, disk space usage, memory usage, latency, and the number of programs running concurrently or in the background."
William Swansen has worked in the employment assistance realm since 2007. He is an author, job search strategist, and career advisor who helps individuals worldwide and in various professions to find their ideal careers.
When responding to this question, you can talk in generalities or discuss the details of the specific processes and tools you use to monitor your programs. It's best to start at a high level and then delve into the details if you feel the interviewer is interested in them. They will indicate their interest by asking follow-up questions or simply remaining silent after you answer the question. You can always ask a qualifying question to determine if they want you to provide more information.
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Performance monitoring is extremely important, especially for high-availability and/or auto-scaling applications. In our microservice applications, we have a "parent" endpoint which we will call the "health" endpoint. This endpoint will return information about the health of each component of the application. The endpoint will call each microservice's internal "health" API which is on a REST API hosted by the microservice itself and can only be accessed by a whitelisted hostname from within the application network. The individual health endpoints will return a 200 status code response consisting of all service-level data that is needed to consider the service "healthy" such as database connectivity, connectivity to the message queueing service, network latency, network connection to external third-party APIs as well as a summary of system-level metrics like RAM/CPU/DISK usage. This data is then compiled by the parent endpoint and compiles a summary of whether or not the individual nodes in the application are healthy. From there, automated steps can be triggered depending on what is "unhealthy" about the application. For instance, if RAM or CPU usage are high, an ansible job can be kicked off to spin up a new container with the microservice and it can automatically add the new instance to the existing infrastructure to distribute the load.
Amanda's Feedback
I like that you begin your response by confirming that performance monitoring is highly important before going on to explain how you monitor software through a parent endpoint. This is a strong example, but if you are also familiar with other techniques used to monitor performance this is a good place to explain other methods you've used. This showcases that you are familiar with a variety of tools or techniques used to optimize performance.
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