Observability Interview Questions
Practice 6 Observability interview questions across every experience level. Think through each one, then reveal the model answer.
6 questions
Traces and Spans Explained
A request hits your API gateway, which calls two backend services, and one of those queries a database. Walk me through what that looks like as a distributed trace. What is a span, and how do spans connect to each other?
JuniorbeginnerMonitoring and Alerting Strategy
How do you design a monitoring and alerting strategy? What metrics would you track and how do you avoid alert fatigue?
MidintermediateAuto vs Manual Instrumentation
You need to roll out tracing across 40 services owned by six different teams. Do you go with auto-instrumentation or manual instrumentation, and how do you decide?
MidintermediateContext Propagation Across Services
Service A calls service B over HTTP. How does B know the request belongs to an existing trace? What actually travels on the wire?
MidintermediateWhy Run an OpenTelemetry Collector
Why run an OpenTelemetry Collector at all instead of having every application export directly to your tracing backend? And how would you deploy it in Kubernetes?
SenioradvancedSampling Strategies at Scale
Your platform handles 50,000 requests per second and tracing every one of them is blowing up the observability bill. How do you approach sampling, and what is the tradeoff between head and tail sampling?
Senioradvanced