If something breaks in production, how do you know about it?

Here is how I would answer that DevOps interview question:

Monitoring and Alerting

The first line of defense is having robust monitoring and alerting systems in place. This includes:

• Monitoring key metrics and KPIs for the application and infrastructure
• Setting up alerts to notify the team when thresholds are breached or anomalies detected
• Integrating monitoring with incident management tools to create tickets and route alerts

Logging and Tracing

Comprehensive logging and tracing is critical for understanding what's happening in production. Key aspects include:

• Structured logging with relevant context
• Centralized log aggregation and search
• Distributed tracing to track requests across services
• Ability to quickly search and analyze logs to identify issues

Incident Response Playbooks

Having well-documented incident response playbooks helps the team quickly diagnose and resolve issues. Playbooks should cover:

• Runbooks for common failure scenarios
• Escalation paths and on-call rotations
• Steps to re...