Pass the PeopleCert DevOps DevOps-SRE Questions and answers with Dumpstech

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The SRE Workbook describes an Error Budget Policy as a formal decision-making framework that defines what actions to take when a service consumes its error budget. Specifically, Google writes: “An error budget policy establishes when and how teams must intervene, whether to pause releases, prioritize reliability work, or adjust processes.” (SRE Workbook – Error Budget Policies). The purpose is to create predictable responses to reliability degradation—not simply alerting, innovation boosting, or bug prevention.

Option C best matches the definition: deciding when and how to intervene based on error budget burn.

Option A is only an alerting rule, not a policy.

Option B is an outcome of a healthy budget, not the policy’s purpose.

Option D is too narrow and is not how error budgets are framed.

Thus, C is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

A Network Reliability Engineer (NRE) is a specialized reliability role focused on applying SRE practices to networking. They use software engineering, SDLC concepts, and automation to manage networks at scale, including SDNs.

Google describes NRE as:

“Network Reliability Engineering applies SRE principles to network management, treating network configuration as code and automating changes safely.”

— Google Reliability Engineering Guidance

Responsibilities include:

Codifying SDN configurations

Automating network deployment

Testing network changes through CI/CD

Reducing network-related outages

Thus, the correct answer is B.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The SRE model heavily emphasizes cross-functional teamwork. In the SRE Workbook and chapters addressing incident management, Google defines collaboration as “bringing together individuals with diverse expertise to jointly solve problems and make decisions.” Collaboration implies active engagement, shared goals, and joint execution—exactly what the statement describes.

Option B, Collaboration, fits perfectly because effective problem-solving during incidents, launches, or reliability engineering work requires engineers from multiple disciplines (e.g., SRE, developers, network teams, product teams) to work together directly.

Option A (Coordination) is more about task alignment, not joint problem-solving.

Option C (Communication) is necessary but insufficient for solving problems together.

Option D (Cooperation) implies helpfulness, not necessarily integrated problem-solving.

Thus, B is the correct concept.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SRE and DevOps share a common view of continuous monitoring—a holistic approach that enables rapid detection, diagnosis, and response across all parts of the system. The SRE Book states: “Monitoring must enable fast detection of anomalies, quick diagnosis, and effective incident response.” Continuous monitoring includes application metrics, infrastructure signals, logs, traces, service health, and user-experience telemetry.

Option B captures this accurately: a combination of tools and processes enabling rapid incident detection and response, especially for cloud services.

Option A is partially correct but too narrow (only end-user transactions).

Option C is generic and does not emphasize continuous or rapid detection.

Option D describes infrastructure monitoring only—not full DevOps/SRE continuous monitoring.

Thus, B is the correct answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The statement “Toil is not important work” is NOT an SRE principle. This is incorrect based on the official Google SRE documentation. In the Site Reliability Engineering Book, toil is treated as a critical concept, because identifying and reducing toil directly enables reliability improvements and more engineering-focused work. The SRE book emphasizes that toil must be taken seriously and systematically reduced, but never dismissed.

From the SRE Book, Chapter “Eliminating Toil”:

“Toil is the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, with no enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows.”

The SRE book further emphasizes:

“SRE teams should measure toil, track it, and make constant efforts to reduce it.”

This demonstrates that toil is significant and should not be ignored. Therefore, any suggestion that “toil is not important work” contradicts the documentation.

The other answer choices are actual SRE principles:

Operations is a software problem — From SRE Book Introduction:“SRE’s approach starts with the belief that operations is fundamentally a software engineering problem.”

Operations is a software problem — From SRE Book Introduction:“SRE’s approach starts with the belief that operations is fundamentally a software engineering problem.”

Automate what is currently done manually — Automation is a central SRE philosophy to reduce toil.

Reduce the cost of failure — Error budgets and controlled risk-taking are core SRE concepts designed to reduce the cost of failure.

Thus, the only option that is NOT an SRE principle is C.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SRE emphasizes organizational alignment and collaboration, warning against siloed thinking. The SRE Book highlights: “Local optimizations at the expense of the broader system lead to inefficiency, misalignment, and reduced reliability.” When individuals or teams focus only on their own “parts” instead of shared goals (“the whole”), it results in decreased cross-team communication, isolation, operational friction, and reduced efficiency.

Option B captures this SRE-documented outcome: increased introversion (siloing) and decreased efficiency.

Option A and D describe positive outcomes that contradict SRE principles of collaboration.

Option C implies healthy sharing, which does not result from silo-first behavior.

Thus, B is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

A blameless post-mortem is a foundational SRE practice that encourages truthful, detailed reporting after an incident. The purpose is to learn, not punish. Google SRE emphasizes that engineers must feel psychologically safe to report what they did, what they assumed, and why they made those decisions.

From the Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter “Postmortem Culture”:

“Blameless postmortems encourage engineers to share the full details of their actions and assumptions without fear of punishment, enabling learning and preventing repeated failures.”

The book further states:

“Understanding the assumptions made during an incident is critical to uncovering systemic issues.”

Thus:

Engineers must report without fear of retribution

They must report assumptions and decisions made during the incident

Therefore, the correct answer is C. Both A and B.

Why the other options are insufficient:

A Only partially correct

B Only partially correct

D Testing data may be included, but it is not the defining feature of blameless postmortems

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The future growth envelope refers to the anticipated growth trajectory of a service, including expected load, user demand, data volume, and performance requirements. Planning for this growth is essential to ensuring that a service can scale reliably without violating SLOs.

The Site Reliability Engineering Book, in discussions on capacity planning, states:

“A key element of capacity planning is estimating future demand so that systems can scale to meet user needs without sacrificing reliability.”

The SRE Workbook reinforces this concept:

“Understanding expected growth enables teams to design systems that scale and remain reliable as usage increases.”

Having the growth envelope defined enables:

Proper capacity planning

Avoiding resource exhaustion

Ensuring scalability before it becomes a reliability problem

Designing architectures that can handle future load

Why the other options are incorrect:

A Signed artifacts relate to supply chain security, not scaling.

C SLO/SLI reviews do not require growth envelope analysis.

D Error budgets relate to reliability thresholds, not capacity forecasting.

Thus, B is the correct answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

The SRE Book defines reliability as: “the probability that a system will perform its intended function correctly for a specified period of time.” (SRE Book – Introduction). Reliability focuses on correctness and consistent performance, not simply uptime. Availability (option A) refers to system uptime or accessibility. Durability (option C) refers to long-term data persistence. Throughput (option D) measures volume of work processed over time.

Because the definition explicitly mentions probability of meeting performance standards and correct output over time, it directly matches the SRE definition of reliability.

Thus, B is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

An error budget accounts for all downtime, including both planned and unplanned outages. This is a critical SRE principle: the user does not distinguish between maintenance downtime and accidental downtime — therefore, neither should the SLO nor the error budget.

The SRE Book, Chapter “Service Level Objectives,” states:

“From the user’s perspective, availability is simply whether the service is working or not, regardless of whether the outage was planned or unplanned.”

This means all downtime counts toward the error budget.

Additionally, the SRE Workbook reinforces this point:

“Error budgets must include every form of unavailability — maintenance events, configuration changes, emergency work, and unexpected incidents.”

This confirms that planned outages (maintenance windows) and unplanned outages (incidents) both consume error budget.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A Only includes unplanned incidents; SRE requires counting planned outages as well.

B Defect fixes may contribute to downtime, but “defect fixes” alone are not a downtime category.

D CAB approval has no bearing on whether outages count toward error budgets.

Thus, C is correct: any planned or unplanned outage must be included.