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.
Incident Response and Problem Ownership
Practices and behavioral expectations for owning incidents from detection through post incident follow up. Topics include how to triage and prioritize incidents, coordinate remediation across teams, communicate impact and status to stakeholders, make trade offs between speed and correctness, maintain an accurate incident timeline, perform blameless postmortems, and drive actionable remediation and prevention tasks. Interviewers may probe for processes used, role responsibilities during an incident, and how outcomes are documented and tracked.
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.
Operational Resilience and Monitoring
Focuses on keeping critical systems reliable and recoverable in the face of failures, attacks, and operational disruption. Topics include designing infrastructure for reliability at scale, handling high volume logging and telemetry without data loss or performance degradation, ensuring detection and response continue during component failures, disaster recovery planning for critical security and business systems, cost and operational trade offs for large scale deployments, and strategies for monitoring the monitoring infrastructure to verify that security information and event management and intrusion detection systems are functioning correctly. Also include incident response coordination, alerting thresholds, observability, and business continuity considerations.
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.
Incident Response and Troubleshooting
Approach to diagnosing and resolving production incidents, outages, and critical failures under time pressure. Covers systematic triage, identifying root causes, maintaining service availability, coordinating with stakeholders, prioritizing safety and mitigation steps, postmortem practices, and learning from incidents to prevent recurrence. Interviewers expect examples showing technical troubleshooting, communication during crises, decision making under pressure, and follow through in remediation and documentation.
Common Production Failure Scenarios
Candidates should be able to enumerate and diagnose common production network failure modes and to describe detection, mitigation, and prevention strategies. Representative scenarios include maximum transmission unit mismatches in tunnels and virtual private networks, domain name resolution failures, dynamic host configuration protocol exhaustion, port connectivity and interface errors, network address translation and firewall rule blockages, address resolution protocol conflicts, virtual local area network misconfiguration, asymmetric routing and black hole situations. For each type of failure describe typical telemetry and alerts, immediate mitigations and workarounds, diagnostic data sources and steps, impact assessment, and durable fixes such as configuration standards, automated testing, and monitoring improvements.
Production Troubleshooting and Incident Response
Emphasizes diagnosing intermittent and performance related issues in live production environments while preserving availability and minimizing user impact. Candidates should describe safe investigative actions and remediation strategies such as runbooks feature flags canary or staged rollouts hotfixes and coordinated rollbacks as well as prioritization under time pressure and communication with stakeholders and on call teams. Technical techniques include network packet capture and analysis kernel level inspection application performance profiling thread and memory analysis and tracing request flows across distributed systems. The topic also covers incident response workflows alerting practices post incident hygiene and choosing low risk diagnostic steps that avoid causing additional disruption in production.
Handling Mistakes and Recovering Gracefully
Share a mistake in database management (e.g., wrong script deployed to production, performance not improving as expected, security oversight discovered). Explain what went wrong, how you recovered, and what you learned. Show accountability and problem-solving under pressure.
Complex and Cross Functional Problem Diagnosis
Approaches for diagnosing multi layer and cross functional problems that span systems, teams, or business domains. Candidates should show ability to coordinate cross discipline investigations, understand cascading failure modes, consider multiple contributing factors such as people process and technology, and lead longer term diagnostic projects including stakeholder alignment, data collection plans, and comprehensive remediation strategies. Applicable to complex sales operations, organizational needs assessments, and multi system outages.