Site reliability engineering uses a precise and standardised vocabulary. This quiz covers the key collocations for tracking SLOs, managing incidents, and publishing postmortems.
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Fill in: 'The SLO dashboard is the primary tool for the team to ___ reliability across all critical user journeys.'
We 'track reliability' — 'track' is the standard collocation for systematically following a metric over time to spot trends and deviations. 'Monitor reliability' is also correct and emphasises ongoing vigilance; 'measure reliability' focuses on a point-in-time calculation; 'watch reliability' is informal.
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Fill in: 'During the on-call review, the team found that the payments service was ___ its SLO error budget faster than expected.'
We 'review SLO burn' — in Site Reliability Engineering, 'burn' is the fixed term for the rate at which error budget is consumed. 'Burning' is the accepted participle in phrases like 'burning through the error budget'. 'Consuming', 'spending', and 'using' are all semantically valid but not the standard SRE collocation.
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Fill in: 'After the third alert in two hours, the on-call engineer decided to ___ an incident and page the wider team.'
We 'declare an incident' — 'declare' is the formal SRE term for officially acknowledging and activating the incident response process. 'Open an incident' is used in ticketing systems; 'start an incident' is informal; 'raise an incident' is also used but 'declare' carries the authority and formality expected of an incident commander.
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Fill in: 'The team was required to ___ a postmortem within five business days of the P1 incident.'
We 'publish a postmortem' — 'publish' is the SRE standard for making the postmortem available to stakeholders as a formal, final document. 'Write a postmortem' describes the drafting phase; 'release' is used for software; 'share' implies informal distribution rather than official publication.
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Fill in: 'The incident manager is responsible for tracking and ___ all action items before the postmortem is archived.'
We 'close action items' — 'close' is the incident management and project tracking standard for marking a task as fully done and verified. 'Complete action items' is close but more generic; 'resolve action items' is used for issues and bugs; 'finish' is informal and does not carry the formal status-update connotation.