IntermediateSITUATIONAL
A service you maintain (written in your primary stack) started failing intermittently under peak load after a deployment. Walk me through the first 5 troubleshooting steps you would take and what telemetry or logs you'd check based on your setup.
Backend Developer
General

Sample Answer

When our Spring Boot service started failing under 800 req/s after a deploy, I first rolled back to confirm the deploy was the trigger and observed error rate drop from 4% to 0.2%. Next I checked deployment logs and app startup metrics in Prometheus: CPU, heap, GC pause times, and thread pool saturation — the GC pause jumped 200ms under load. Third, I looked at application logs (structured JSON in ELK) for stack traces and saw connection pool timeouts. Fourth, I examined downstream latency graphs (Postgres and Redis) and found DB p99 spiked 3x. Fifth, I ran a focused load test against staging with profiling enabled and reproduced the thread contention tied to a synchronous batch call; I then implemented async batching and increased DB pool from 20 to 50, which brought error rate back under 0.5% and reduced p99 by ~40%.

Keywords

Rollback to verify deployment impact and compare pre/post metricsCheck infra/app telemetry: CPU, heap, GC, thread pools, connection poolsCorrelate application logs with downstream latency (DB/Redis) and run targeted repro/profiling
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