IntermediateSITUATIONAL
Your team is under pressure to release a new feature quickly, but you see significant gaps in monitoring and alerting for the new services. How would you handle this situation, and what concrete steps would you take to balance speed with reliability?
DevOps Engineer
General

Sample Answer

Situation: At my last role, a product launch was blocked unless we shipped an API in 48 hours, but observability was missing. Task: I needed to support a fast release without repeating prior outages that caused 2–3 hours MTTR. Action: I proposed a “minimum viable observability” plan: within one day we added Prometheus metrics (latency, error rate, saturation) and OpenTelemetry traces; defined 3 SLIs/SLOs; and created high-severity alerts in Grafana/Alertmanager with on-call routing via PagerDuty. Additional dashboards were planned post-launch. Result: We hit the release date, while keeping MTTR under 30 minutes and avoiding Sev-1 incidents during the first 60 days. Leadership adopted this lightweight observability checklist for all new services, reducing post-release incident volume by ~40%.

Keywords

Define and negotiate a minimum viable observability scope with stakeholdersImplement core metrics, traces, and 2–3 critical alerts before releaseUse concrete tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Alertmanager, OpenTelemetry, PagerDuty)Show measurable reliability gains: MTTR reduction and fewer incidents
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