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Troubleshoot a production server outage

MetaSite Reliability Engineer · Technical Screen
MediumSite Reliability EngineerTechnical ScreenSoftware Engineering Fundamentals

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This question evaluates a candidate's competency in observability, incident response, and Linux/server operations, including troubleshooting production outages, isolating latency causes, identifying running processes and services, and recognizing finite resource bottlenecks.

You are the on-call engineer responsible for a production server for the next several days. Discuss how you would approach the following:

  • How would you make sure the server continues to run normally while you are responsible for it?
  • If an incident happens, how would you troubleshoot it end to end?
  • If user requests are hanging or taking too long to return, what are the likely causes and how would you isolate them?
  • How would you quickly discover which programs and services are running on the server?
  • What are the key finite resources on a server that can become bottlenecks?
  • If you were advising a non-expert who operates a website or service, what operational best practices would you recommend so that the system is easier to monitor and maintain?

Answer as if this is a production engineering or site reliability interview focused on observability, incident response, and basic Linux/server operations.