Site Reliability Engineer Mock Interview
Master 30 SRE interview questions covering incident response, system design, and on-call scenarios.
Question 23 of 30
How do you establish SLOs and SLIs, and are you open to making adjustments to these when warranted?
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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.
Service level objectives and service level indicators are the keystones of the work SREs perform. Interviewers will be interested to learn how you go about establishing these and whether you are open to changes once the project is underway. They're looking for a balance between commitment to the metrics used by SREs as well as the flexibility to change when circumstances demand it. Your answer should demonstrate a systematic approach to establishing the criteria used to measure the success of a project while also showing that you can adjust projects as they move forward to optimize them.
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 scoping and planning a new project, the first thing I do is understand the service level agreements project stakeholders are looking for. This helps me establish the service level objectives which will result in the SLA being met. Once I have SLOs set up, it is relatively easy to build a list of service level indicators that will tell the project stakeholders how the project is progressing and if the SLOs and SLI days are being met. I've found that a top-down approach works best. I'm also open to adjusting the SLOs and SLIs if it is determined that they are either too liberal or too strict and will not result in a predetermined SLA."
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