sprkdsprkd.io
📊Skill assessment · 140 questions

Observability & Monitoring skill assessment

See inside your systems before they fall over.

Take the assessment →🧑‍🏫 Learn hands-onProfessional→

What it covers

Observability Concepts

Before picking tools, know what you're trying to see. The three pillars and a measurement method (RED/USE) frame what 'good coverage' means.

Three pillars: metrics, logs, tracesWhite-box vs black-box monitoringRED method vs USE methodThe four golden signals: latency, traffic, errors, saturation

Prometheus Architecture

Prometheus scrapes, not receives. Understand the pull model, how it discovers targets, and where data lives once collected.

Pull-based scraping vs push gatewaysTSDB storage and local retentionService discovery (static configs, Kubernetes SD, file SD)Federation and remote write/read for scaling out

PromQL: Selecting & Rates

Reading data out starts with vectors and matchers. rate() and its cousins turn raw counters into meaningful per-second signals.

Instant vectors vs range vectorsLabel matchers and selectors (=, !=, =~, !~)rate() vs irate() vs increase()Time ranges, offset, and subqueries

PromQL: Aggregation & Functions

Turn many time series into one answer. Aggregation operators and vector matching are how you roll up and correlate metrics correctly.

sum/avg/max/min/count with by() and without()histogram_quantile() for latency percentilesVector matching: on(), ignoring(), group_left/group_righttopk/bottomk and predict_linear() for forecasting

Instrumentation & Exporters

Decide what to expose and how. Pick the right metric type, instrument code directly or bolt on an exporter, and pre-aggregate the expensive stuff.

Counter / gauge / histogram / summaryClient libraries for direct instrumentationExporters (node_exporter, blackbox_exporter) vs native /metricsRecording rules to pre-compute costly queries

Alerting & Dashboarding

Alert on symptoms users feel, budgeted by SLOs, then visualize the same signals in Grafana without the graph lying to you.

SLI / SLO / error budgets and symptom vs cause alertingBurn-rate alerts and Alertmanager routing/grouping/silencesGrafana panels, data sources, variables/templatingDashboards-as-code and misleading graphs (rate windows, axes)

Ready to benchmark your Observability & Monitoring skills?

140 questions · about 5 minutes · see your level and percentile instantly.

Take the assessment →

Explore other assessments

🤖AI Engineering🧑‍💻AI for Coding🧠Building AI on the Cloud☸️Kubernetes☁️AWS Cloud🎨Frontend Engineering⚙️Backend Engineering🗄️Databases📦Containerization🔐Security & DevSecOps🏗️Terraform & IaC🐍Python🚀CI/CD & Delivery Pipelines🔁GitOps & Delivery🧩System Design🐧Linux & the Command Line🔷Microsoft Azure🌥️Google Cloud📜Shell Scripting