Monitoring

Monitoring, Logging, Alerting & SLAs

Observability is what lets you know whether your system is working before customers do. This lesson covers the three pillars (metrics, logs, traces), the SRE-grade definitions of SLI / SLO / SLA, and the operational practices that turn raw telemetry into actionable alerts (RED method, USE method, error budgets, alert fatigue control). We tour the standard production stack (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, ELK, Datadog) and the pitfalls that cause teams to either drown in alerts or miss real incidents. By the end you can design an observability strategy and defend it in an interview against the question 'how would you know if this system was broken?'.

Debugging & Production Incident Stories

Production-incident questions are the operational-judgement probe. They test whether you can act calmly under live pressure, separate mitigation from root-cause work, and tell a blameless story that distinguishes systems-level lessons from individual blame. This lesson defines incident-grade storytelling (timeline craft with explicit T+0 / T+5 / T+30 markers), draws the line between fix, remediation, and prevention, walks through blameless-postmortem language you can use in the room without sounding rehearsed, and provides fully worked model STAR answers for the prompts you will hear most. Every model answer in this lesson focuses blame on systems and processes, never on people or teams. After this lesson you will be able to take any real incident from your career and shape it into an answer that scores on calm, judgement, and operational maturity simultaneously.