Explain SLI/SLO/SLA and design monitoring
GoogleSoftware Engineer · Onsite
Last updated
This question evaluates a candidate's competency in service reliability and observability, specifically understanding and distinguishing SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs, planning error budgets, and designing monitoring and alerting for a production web API.
Explain the differences between SLI, SLO, and SLA with concrete examples for a web API (e.g., availability and latency). Given a quarterly target SLO, define a reasonable error budget and show how you would apportion and track its consumption over time. Then design a monitoring and alerting system that minimizes alert fatigue: choose which signals to alert on, set thresholds relative to SLOs, aggregate and deduplicate alerts, apply multi-window/multi-burn-rate policies, and define escalation, silencing, and runbook practices.
Solution walkthrough is for members
Get the full walkthrough with reference code and complexity analysis, plus Kitty Coach at 300 messages a day. Hints, the code runner and community answers stay free.