PeopleCert DevOps-SRE - Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Foundation v1.2

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Automation is the primary method of reducing toil in SRE. The Google Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter “Eliminating Toil,” states:

“Automation is the most effective tool for reducing toil. Any recurring, manual, automatable task should be automated to prevent it from consuming engineering time.”

Automated release systems directly eliminate toil by:

Removing manual deployment steps

Removing repeated, error-prone human processes

Increasing reliability and consistency

Freeing engineers for high-value project work

The SRE Workbook reinforces this:

“CI/CD pipelines and release automation remove significant operational toil by replacing manual processes with repeatable, reliable automation.”

Why the other answers are incorrect:

B AI is not required for toil reduction.

C Meeting travel is not an SRE toil concern.

D Incorrect; automation dramatically reduces long-term toil, even though initial setup requires effort.

Thus, A is the correct answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

A Production Readiness Review (PRR) is a core SRE practice ensuring that a service meets specific reliability, operational, monitoring, and alerting standards before SRE assumes responsibility. The Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Workbook states: “PRRs validate that a service is prepared for production and ready for SRE engagement, ensuring operational readiness, monitoring completeness, on-call preparation, and automation maturity.” The goal is not merely organizational handover but ensuring the service is fully prepared for reliable operation in production.

Option A fits this definition exactly: ensuring the service is ready for SRE support.

Option B focuses on development/testing readiness, not production readiness.

Option C references standards/frameworks not part of PRR’s purpose.

Option D is only a partial implication—transition of accountability happens after PRR readiness, not the main purpose of PRR.

Thus, A is the correct SRE-aligned answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Simplicity is a core SRE design principle. Google states: “Small, frequent, automated changes reduce risk and improve system stability.” (SRE Book – Release Engineering). Automating continuous, small deployments creates a simple and repeatable pipeline that increases agility while maintaining reliability. This approach aligns with both DevOps and SRE practices: reducing deployment complexity, lowering blast radius, and supporting rapid iteration.

Option B best reflects this philosophy: automated, continuous small deployments provide simplicity, stability, and agility simultaneously.

Option A improves process clarity but does not directly affect agility.

Option C is beneficial but broader and not specific to simplicity.

Option D focuses on control rather than agility.

Thus, B is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

SRE defines effective monitoring as comprehensive observability across all layers of a system, including latency, traffic, errors, saturation, dependencies, and infrastructure. The SRE Book states: “Monitoring must offer insight across all system components, enabling teams to rapidly detect and diagnose issues.” (SRE Book – Monitoring Distributed Systems). Observability instrumentation (logs, metrics, traces) provides the necessary depth for reliable digital experience monitoring.

Option B captures this exactly: broad observability across all components and layers.

Option A rejects modern observability practices—contradicting SRE guidance.

Option C is too narrow (network-only).

Option D focuses only on advanced technologies, not comprehensive coverage.

Thus, B is the best answer.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Service Level Indicators (SLIs) provide the quantitative measurements needed to determine how much of the Service Level Objective (SLO) has been consumed. Since the error budget is defined as the allowable amount of unreliability, SLI data is the source of truth for calculating how much of that budget remains.

From the Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter “Service Level Objectives”:

“SLIs provide the measurements used to determine compliance with SLOs. Error budgets are computed directly from the SLI measurements over the defined time window.”

The SRE Workbook further explains:

“Error budgets quantify the inverse of SLO performance. SLIs provide the raw data that allow teams to calculate how much of the budget has been consumed and how much remains.”

Thus, SLI data is the Only mechanism that determines remaining error budget.

Therefore, the statement is True.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

In the Full SRE model, reliability becomes a first-class citizen because SREs own the complete operational responsibility for the service and apply SRE principles end-to-end. The Google SRE Book describes several adoption models (Consulting, Embedded, and Full), and only the Full SRE model has SREs fully accountable for reliability outcomes.

From the Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter “SRE Engagement Models”:

“In the Full SRE model, the SRE team is responsible for end-to-end reliability. Reliability becomes a first-class objective, supported through SLOs, error budgets, and systematic reduction of toil.”

The Full model includes:

Full ownership of reliability

Enforcement of SLOs

Error budget policies

Engineering-driven improvement

Other models:

Consulting → SRE gives guidance but doesn’t own reliability

Embedded → temporary embedding to train teams, not full ownership

Platform → focuses on shared tooling, not service ownership

Thus, D. Full is correct.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation From Exact Extract:

Known workarounds represent toil that has no enduring value, one of the key characteristics of toil defined by the SRE framework.

From the Site Reliability Engineering Book, Chapter “Eliminating Toil”:

“Toil is work that is manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, has no enduring value, and scales linearly with service size.”

Known workarounds fit this definition because:

They solve the same recurring problems repeatedly

They do not permanently fix the underlying issue

They consume engineer time without contributing long-term improvements

These activities lack enduring value and should be eliminated through automation or engineering fixes.

Why the other options are incorrect:

A. Linear scaling — Many forms of toil scale linearly, but this does not specifically describe workarounds.

B. Tactical — Tactical means short-term, but not all tactical work is a workaround.

C. Automatable — While some workarounds can be automated, not all are.

D. No enduring value — This is the defining trait of workaround-type toil.

Therefore, option D is correct.

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:

SRE defines capacity planning as the discipline of ensuring that a system has enough resources to meet expected demand, both now and in the future. The SRE Book states: “Capacity planning ensures that services have sufficient resources available to meet reliability and performance targets, accounting for growth, trends, and forecasted usage.” (SRE Book – Chapter: Capacity Planning). This involves forecasting workloads, analyzing trends, and creating plans to scale infrastructure so that service-level objectives can continue to be met.

Option C correctly describes capacity planning as creating a resource management plan to meet demand.

Option A refers to capacity monitoring, not planning.

Option B reflects generic resource management or cloud provider operations, not SRE capacity planning.

Option D refers to determining maximum capacity, which is a measurement activity—not full planning.

Thus, C is the correct SRE-aligned answer.

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.