5 collocation exercises on monitoring and alerting verbs.
0 / 5 completed
1 / 5
The SRE team sets up Prometheus and Grafana to ___ all production services around the clock.
To monitor services means to continuously observe their health, performance, and error rates using tooling. Monitor is the foundational observability verb, behind "monitoring and alerting" and tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Datadog. Watch over, look at, and check in on are informal and passive. Engineers set up "monitoring stacks to monitor every service," so monitor services is the correct collocation for the systematic, automated observation of production systems.
2 / 5
The monitoring rule is configured to ___ an alert when the 99th percentile latency exceeds two seconds.
All three verbs — alert, fire, and trigger — are valid and natural collocations for the action of a monitoring rule sending a notification. Alert: "the rule alerts the on-call engineer." Fire: "the alert fires when the threshold is breached." Trigger: "the condition triggers an alert." All three are widely used in monitoring vocabulary. Prometheus documentation uses "alert rules that fire," PagerDuty uses "trigger an alert," and engineers use all three interchangeably in conversations about monitoring configuration.
3 / 5
The engineer received too many false positives and decided to ___ the alert for the next maintenance window.
To silence an alert means to temporarily suppress it so it does not page during a known maintenance or investigation period. Silence is the precise term, as in "alert silencing" and "silenced in PagerDuty." Turn off is too blunt (it implies disabling the rule), switch away and pause over are not real collocations. Engineers "silence the alert for 4 hours during deployment," so silence the alert is the correct collocation for a temporary suppression that avoids paging without disabling the monitoring rule.
4 / 5
When the incident is declared, the on-call engineer must ___ the alert to confirm they are investigating.
To acknowledge an alert means to signal that an engineer has seen it and is taking responsibility for the investigation. Acknowledge is the precise incident-management term, as in "ack the alert" and "acknowledgement in PagerDuty." Accept in, confirm over, and receive out are informal or not real collocations. PagerDuty shows "acknowledged by @engineer," so acknowledge the alert is the correct collocation for the formal step of claiming ownership of an active alert during an incident response.
5 / 5
Once the fix is deployed and confirmed stable, the SRE will ___ the incident in the monitoring tool.
To resolve an incident means to mark it as closed in the monitoring or incident-management tool after the fix is confirmed. Resolve is the standard incident-lifecycle term, as in "resolve the incident" and "mean time to resolve (MTTR)." Close out is acceptable in some systems but less precise, and finish off and end over are informal. Status pages and tools like PagerDuty show "incident resolved," so resolve the incident is the correct collocation for the formal closure of an incident after service is restored.