Explain SLI/SLO/SLA and design monitoring

Quick Overview

This question evaluates a candidate's competency in service reliability and observability, specifically understanding and distinguishing SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs, planning error budgets, and designing monitoring and alerting for a production web API.

Explain SLI/SLO/SLA and design monitoring

Company: Google

Role: Software Engineer

Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals

Difficulty: hard

Interview Round: Onsite

Explain the differences between SLI, SLO, and SLA with concrete examples for a web API (e.g., availability and latency). Given a quarterly target SLO, define a reasonable error budget and show how you would apportion and track its consumption over time. Then design a monitoring and alerting system that minimizes alert fatigue: choose which signals to alert on, set thresholds relative to SLOs, aggregate and deduplicate alerts, apply multi-window/multi-burn-rate policies, and define escalation, silencing, and runbook practices.

Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's competency in service reliability and observability, specifically understanding and distinguishing SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs, planning error budgets, and designing monitoring and alerting for a production web API.

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Sep 6, 2025, 12:00 AM
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SLI vs SLO vs SLA for a Web API; Error Budgets; Monitoring and Alerting Design

Context: You are designing reliability goals and on-call policies for a production web API that serves JSON over HTTPS. Requests include a mix of GET/POST endpoints. You need to define what you measure (SLIs), targets (SLOs), the contractual promise (SLA), plan an error budget for a quarterly SLO, and design monitoring/alerting that minimizes alert fatigue.

Tasks

  1. Define and contrast SLI, SLO, and SLA. Give concrete SLI examples for:
    • Availability (success rate)
    • Latency (e.g., request duration under a threshold)
  2. Given a quarterly target SLO, define a reasonable error budget, and show how you would apportion and track its consumption over time.
  3. Design a monitoring and alerting system that minimizes alert fatigue:
    • Choose which signals to alert on and why
    • Set alert thresholds relative to SLOs
    • Aggregate and deduplicate alerts
    • Apply multi-window/multi-burn-rate policies
    • Define escalation, silencing, and runbook practices
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