Daily DevOps Interview Questions Day #75

Daily Interview Questions for SRE and DevOps engineers

Question of the day:

So this happens once in a while... The API is slow—users are complaining about 10-15 second response times for requests that normally take 200ms.

You check the dashboards:

• CPU: 15% across all pods

• Memory: 40% usage, no leaks

• Database: Query times under 50ms

• Network: Normal traffic patterns

• No recent deployments

Your manager asks: “If everything looks fine, why is the API slow?”

Walk me through how you’d debug this. In the answer I’ll be explaining how I expect a mid level vs senior level engineer candidate to respond to this.