AWS
What AWS service would you use for serverless functions?
Lambda
What Azure service provides scalable object storage?
Azure Blob Storage
Name one of the three pillars of observability.
Metrics, logs, or traces.
What is PagerDuty primarily used for?
Incident response and on-call alerting/management.
What does 'patching' mean?
Updating software to fix bugs or security issues.
What is the serverless tool for orchestrating workflows?
Step Functions
What Azure service is used to deploy web apps with built-in scaling?
Azure App Service
What is NRDB?
New Relic Database—the platform’s telemetry data store queried by NRQL.
What does it mean to 'acknowledge' an incident?
To indicate you're actively responding, pausing further escalation.
What is a VPN used for?
To securely connect to a private network over the internet.
Which AWS service provides a managed relational data warehouse?
Redshift
What Azure service provides a managed message broker for queues and topics?
Azure Service Bus
What does 'Golden Metrics' typically refer to in APM?
Latency, traffic/throughput, errors, and saturation (or similar core health signals).
What is a response play?
A predefined set of actions (responders, conferences, status updates) launched during an incident.
What is a security incident?
An event that compromises (or threatens) confidentiality, integrity, or availability.
Name one AWS service used for security.
IAM (Identity and Access Management), GuardDuty, etc.
What Azure service provides infrastructure as code natively?
Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates or Bicep
What’s a practical way to correlate logs and traces?
Include trace.id/span.id in logs (or use automatic correlation via agents/OTel) so logs can link to traces.
Name one PagerDuty feature that reduces alert noise.
Intelligent Alert Grouping, Auto-Pause Incident Notifications, or Event Orchestration suppression rules.
What is TLS used for?
Encrypting data in transit between clients and servers.
Name an AWS service or feature for encrypting data at rest using customer-managed keys.
AWS KMS (Key Management Service)
What Azure service safely runs failure injection experiments on cloud workloads?
Azure Chaos Studio
How would you validate an alert condition before rolling it out widely?
Test against historical data, tune thresholds, use preview/testing, and stage rollout to avoid noise.
What is a status dashboard / status page integration used for?
Communicating incident impact to customers automatically as PagerDuty incidents progress.
What is a post-incident review (PIR)?
A blameless analysis to learn from an incident and prevent recurrence.