SRE Foundation practice examsIn development
SRE Foundation
The vocabulary and reasoning of site reliability engineering: reliability engineered and measured with one hundred per cent deliberately rejected, the indicator, objective and agreement distinction with the agreement set looser, error budgets meant to be spent and governed by a policy agreed in advance, and the specific definition of toil with its cap; then the four golden signals with symptom-based alerting, incident roles with mitigation before diagnosis, blameless postmortems producing owned actions, and progressive change with an engagement model that has exit criteria.
What you get
Papers are cut from the bank and weighted like the real exam, and no question appears in two of them. Every wrong answer comes back on later days until you have it right.
What the exam covers
| Principles, service levels, error budgets and toil | Not published |
| Monitoring, incident response, learning and organisation | Not published |
Two sample questions
1. What distinguishes monitoring from observability?
- One runs continuously and the other runs on demand
- One belongs to operations and the other to developers
- One uses metrics and the other uses only logs
- One answers known questions, the other unanticipated ones — correct
Why: Both are needed, since not every failure is one you predicted.
2. Why record the incident timeline as it happens rather than afterwards?
- The postmortem has to be filed within a day
- The commander is not present after the event
- The logs are deleted once the incident ends
- Memory reshapes the sequence once the outcome is known — correct
Why: Contemporaneous notes are far more reliable than recollection.
The real SRE Foundation exam
| Length | 60 minutes |
|---|---|
| Questions | 40 |
| Pass mark | 65% |
| Price | Sold through DevOps Institute accredited training partners |
| Recommended before you sit it | None. Familiarity with operations or development practice helps. |
| Valid for | Does not expire |
Exam facts as published by DevOps Institute; always check the vendor’s page before you book.
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