Troubleshoot a production server outage
Company: Meta
Role: Site Reliability Engineer
Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
You are the on-call engineer responsible for a production server for the next several days. Discuss how you would approach the following:
- How would you make sure the server continues to run normally while you are responsible for it?
- If an incident happens, how would you troubleshoot it end to end?
- If user requests are hanging or taking too long to return, what are the likely causes and how would you isolate them?
- How would you quickly discover which programs and services are running on the server?
- What are the key finite resources on a server that can become bottlenecks?
- If you were advising a non-expert who operates a website or service, what operational best practices would you recommend so that the system is easier to monitor and maintain?
Answer as if this is a production engineering or site reliability interview focused on observability, incident response, and basic Linux/server operations.
Overview: This question evaluates a candidate's competency in observability, incident response, and Linux/server operations, including troubleshooting production outages, isolating latency causes, identifying running processes and services, and recognizing finite resource bottlenecks.
Read the full Meta Site Reliability Engineer interview experience this question came from