Incident Troubleshooting: Intermittent Failures and Elevated Latency in Transfers
Context
A microservices-based banking platform begins experiencing intermittent failures and elevated latency for transfer operations starting at a specific time. Assume you have standard observability and deployment tooling (dashboards for metrics, logs, tracing; feature flags; canary/rollback; cloud infrastructure; message queues) and that transfer requests flow through an API gateway to service(s) that interact with a database and at least one external payment partner.
Task
Describe your end-to-end troubleshooting approach:
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Which dashboards, metrics, logs, and traces you would inspect first, and why.
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How you would form and test hypotheses to pinpoint the cause.
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How you would isolate whether the issue is in the client, network/edge, service/application, database, message queue, or an external dependency.
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What short-term, safe mitigations you would apply to limit user impact while investigating.
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How you would verify the fix and execute postmortem actions to prevent recurrence.