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Fundamentals of Observability Questions

Practice questions for Fundamentals of Observability topic in OpenTelemetry Certified Associate. 36 questions covering this domain.

36 questions12 easy17 medium7 hard
Q1
medium

A team wants to instrument applications once and keep the freedom to change observability backends later without re-instrumenting. Which OpenTelemetry...

Q2
medium

A team needs telemetry from a third-party application but cannot modify its source code. Which OpenTelemetry approach is the best fit?

Q3
medium

An SRE wants to know how many requests completed in under one second and how request latency is distributed overall. Which signal is the best match?

Q4
medium

A platform team wants log data that downstream systems can reliably parse and analyze at scale. Which log format should it prefer in production?

Q5
easy

Which statement accurately describes OpenTelemetry itself?

Q6
hard

A company wants to reduce lock-in after repeatedly re-instrumenting applications whenever it changes vendors. Which adoption outcome best matches the ...

Q7
easy

Why are semantic conventions important in OpenTelemetry?

Q8
easy

What does observability mean in the context of OpenTelemetry?

Q9
medium

A developer wants to understand the full path a single user request takes across several services. Which telemetry signal is most appropriate?

Q10
easy

Which term describes a timestamped text record, either structured or unstructured, with optional metadata that is emitted by services or other compone...

Q11
hard

A company decides not to sample any of its trace data. An architect objects, citing the OpenTelemetry documentation. Which scenario from the official ...

Q12
easy

What does SLI stand for in the context of observability and reliability?

Q13
medium

An SRE team wants to define targets for service reliability in a way that can be communicated clearly to business stakeholders. Which concept attaches...

Q14
hard

A team generates 500 error traces per second in a high-traffic service, but head sampling is dropping most of them before they reach the backend. Whic...

Q15
medium

An engineer wants to understand the root cause of a sudden spike in page-load time that affects only certain users. Which combination of signals provi...

Q16
medium

A platform team deploys OpenTelemetry for the first time and wants to start with logs from existing applications before adding traces. Which first ste...

Q17
medium

A team notices that logs from the same request across services are hard to correlate in their backend. They have already deployed the OpenTelemetry SD...

Q18
easy

Which OpenTelemetry signal is specifically designed to represent the path of a single request as it propagates through multiple services?

Q19
hard

A backend receives web server logs where some lines follow Common Log Format and others append a trailing JSON blob. What should ingestion do before l...

Q20
medium

A team emits JSON logs, but different services use different field names and types for similar events. How should those logs be classified?

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