Enterprise Operations & Incident Management Topics
Large-scale operational practices for enterprise systems including major incident response, crisis leadership, enterprise-scale troubleshooting, business continuity planning, and recovery. Covers coordination across teams during high-severity incidents, forensic investigation, decision-making under pressure, post-incident processes, and resilience architecture. Distinct from Security & Compliance in its focus on operational coordination and recovery rather than preventive security.
Disaster Recovery Objectives and Methods
Covers the core goals and recovery approaches for recovering systems after a failure. Candidates should understand Recovery Time Objective which defines how quickly systems must be restored, and Recovery Point Objective which bounds acceptable data loss. Describe and compare recovery methods such as cold standby, warm standby, and hot standby including their cost, complexity, and expected recovery times. Discuss how to choose an approach based on business impact analysis, critical path dependencies, and cost versus risk trade offs. Explain runbooks and failover orchestration, automation of recovery procedures, validation and regular testing of recovery plans, metrics and monitoring for recovery readiness, and operational considerations for maintaining standby systems and exercising failover in production-like tests.
Alerting Strategy and Incident Response
Design alerting strategies and incident response practices that turn observability signals into actionable operations. Topics include alert design and classification, threshold versus anomaly detection, preventing alert fatigue, escalation and on call flow, runbook and playbook design, integrating alerts with incident management, post incident review and blameless postmortems, and how monitoring and observability feed incident detection and mean time to resolution improvements. Includes designing alerts for different domains and thinking through what runbooks and context to provide to responders.
Learning From Failure and Continuous Improvement
This topic focuses on how candidates reflect on mistakes, failed experiments, and suboptimal outcomes and convert those experiences into durable learning and process improvement. Interviewers evaluate ability to describe what went wrong, perform root cause analysis, execute immediate remediation and course correction, run blameless postmortems or retrospectives, and implement systemic changes such as new guardrails, tests, or documentation. The scope includes individual growth habits and team level practices for institutionalizing lessons, measuring the impact of changes, promoting psychological safety for experimentation, and mentoring others to apply learned improvements. Candidates should demonstrate humility, data driven diagnosis, iterative experimentation, and examples showing how failure led to measurable better outcomes at project or organizational scale.
Production Engineering and Incident Response
Operational practices for running services in production and responding to incidents. Topics include monitoring and alerting design, on call procedures, incident triage and mitigation, root cause analysis and postmortem writing, debugging in production, runbook creation and execution, incident communication and escalation, automation to reduce toil, and preventive practices such as chaos engineering and capacity testing. Interviewers typically ask for concrete incidents, actions taken, lessons learned, and changes implemented.
Incident Response and Management
Operational practices for detecting diagnosing and resolving production incidents and for learning from failures to improve reliability. Topics include correlating telemetry signals to form meaningful alerts, designing alerting policies and dashboards that balance sensitivity and noise reduction, escalation and on call workflows, runbook creation and use, incident lifecycle management and roles and responsibilities during incidents, communication for stakeholders and customers during incidents, post incident analysis and postmortem processes, and tooling to support incident triage and resolution. Candidates are assessed on designing effective escalation paths runbooks and communication plans and on using observability data to reduce time to detect and time to resolve and to prevent recurrence.
Incident Response and Runbook Design
Covers the design and operation of incident response programs and the creation and maintenance of actionable runbooks and playbooks for production systems. Candidates should be able to explain the incident lifecycle from detection and classification through investigation, escalation, remediation, and post incident analysis. Topics include severity definitions and assessment, escalation procedures, team roles and responsibilities, communication protocols during incidents, on call rotations, alert triage, and coordination across teams during outages. Also includes designing automated remediation steps where appropriate, integrating runbooks with monitoring and alerting systems, maintaining playbooks for common failure modes such as malware, data exfiltration, denial of service, and account compromise, and conducting blameless post incident reviews and continuous improvement. Candidates should be able to discuss metrics for measuring response effectiveness such as mean time to detect, mean time to repair, and response success rate, and describe approaches to improve those metrics over time.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Designing and maintaining plans, architectures, and processes to ensure service continuity and recoverability after major incidents or disasters. Topics include defining Recovery Time Objective and Recovery Point Objective, conducting business impact analysis and tiering services by criticality, dependency mapping and recovery ordering, selecting replication and backup strategies including synchronous and asynchronous replication, active active and active passive topologies, snapshots and transaction log based point in time recovery, and planning cold, warm, and hot recovery sites. Also covers failover and failback procedures, orchestration and automation of recovery workflows, runbook creation and stakeholder roles and communications, regular disaster recovery testing and exercises including tabletop, simulated failover, full recovery drills and chaos engineering, metrics tracking such as mean time to recovery and actual Recovery Time Objective achieved, off site and geographic redundancy considerations, cloud versus on premise trade offs, regulatory and data residency requirements, and postexercise reviews to close recovery gaps.