5 collocation exercises on monitoring, alerting and on-call.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
For a new service, you should ___ monitoring.
You set up monitoring — instrumenting a service with metrics, logs and dashboards before it goes live. The phrasal verb set up collocates naturally with monitoring, alerting and logging. Rig down, mount off and fit out are not idiomatic. Setting up monitoring early means you can detect problems quickly, understand normal behaviour, and define meaningful alerts rather than flying blind after launch.
2 / 5
To express a reliability target, you ___ an SLO.
You define an SLO (Service Level Objective) — a measurable reliability target such as 99.9% availability. The verb define collocates with SLO, SLA and error budget. Frame up, pen off and coin out are wrong. A well-defined SLO drives alerting and prioritisation: when you burn through the error budget too fast, the team shifts focus from features to reliability work.
3 / 5
When a critical alert fires, the system will ___ the on-call engineer.
The system pages on-call — sending an urgent notification (a page) to the engineer responsible for responding. Page derives from old pager devices and is the standard incident-response verb (page the on-call, get paged). Buzz up, ring off and call out are not idiomatic here. Paging should be reserved for genuinely actionable, urgent problems to avoid alert fatigue.
4 / 5
To stop a noisy non-urgent alert temporarily, you ___ it.
You silence an alert — suppressing its notifications for a set period, typically during known maintenance. The verb silence collocates with alert in tools like Alertmanager and PagerDuty. Mute off, hush up and quiet out are not the standard terms. Silencing is temporary and scoped; it prevents pointless pages during planned work without permanently disabling the underlying alert rule.
5 / 5
If an incident exceeds your scope, you ___ it.
You escalate an incident — handing it to a more senior engineer or a wider team when it is beyond your ability or authority to resolve. The verb escalate collocates with incident, issue and ticket. Bump up, raise off and lift out are wrong. Clear escalation paths ensure major incidents get the right people involved quickly rather than stalling with a single overwhelmed responder.