Career upgrade: Learn practical AI skills for better jobs and higher pay.
Level up
PracticeVideosBlogFlashcardsEspañol
All Practice Exams

100+ Free SRE Practitioner Practice Questions

Pass your SRE Practitioner Certification exam on the first try — instant access, no signup required.

✓ No registration✓ No credit card✓ No hidden fees✓ Start practicing immediately
100+ Questions
100% Free
1 / 100
Question 1
Score: 0/0

An SLO is defined as 99.95% successful checkout completion over a rolling 28-day window. The current 28-day measurement shows 99.91%. What is the most accurate statement?

A
B
C
D
to track
Same family resources

Explore More DevOps Institute Certifications

Continue into nearby exams from the same family. Each card keeps practice questions, study guides, flashcards, videos, and articles in one place.

DevOps Foundation

Practice Questions

DevOps Institute SRE Foundation

Practice Questions

DevOps Institute AIOps Foundation

Practice Questions

DevOps Institute Change Management Foundation

Practice Questions

DevOps Institute Continuous Delivery Architecture (CDA)

Practice Questions

DevOps Institute Continuous Testing Foundation (CTF)

Practice Questions
2026 Statistics

Key Facts: SRE Practitioner Exam

26/40

Passing Score

65%

90 min

Exam Duration

PeopleCert

Open book

Exam Format

DevOps Institute

3 years

Certification Validity

PeopleCert renewal model

30-50 hrs

Typical Study Time

Practical estimate

$279

Exam Fee

PeopleCert direct pricing

SRE Practitioner is a 40-question, 90-minute open-book exam requiring 65% to pass (26/40). The DevOps Institute / PeopleCert blueprint covers eight advanced modules with the heaviest weight on building secure and reliable systems (20%), followed by platform engineering and AIOps (15%), and an even split across anti-patterns, SLOs, observability, incident response, and chaos engineering. SRE Foundation is strongly recommended before attempting Practitioner.

Sample SRE Practitioner Practice Questions

Try these sample questions to test your SRE Practitioner exam readiness. Each question includes a detailed explanation. Start the interactive quiz above for the full 100+ question experience with AI tutoring.

1Which scenario best illustrates an SRE anti-pattern often called 'rebadged ops'?
A.A team renames its operations group to SRE without changing how work is prioritized or how toil is reduced
B.A team adopts error budgets and uses them to govern release pacing
C.A team measures SLIs from the user's perspective and tunes alerts accordingly
D.A team automates a repeatable runbook and retires the manual procedure
Explanation: Rebadging an operations team as SRE without adopting engineering-driven reliability work, error budgets, and toil reduction is a well-known anti-pattern. The DevOps Institute SRE Practitioner syllabus highlights this as the most common cultural failure when organizations 'adopt SRE' in name only. Real SRE adoption changes how reliability is engineered, measured, and prioritized, not just job titles.
2An SRE team manages dozens of unique server configurations that nobody dares re-image because each one was customized over time. Which anti-pattern does this describe?
A.Snowflake servers
B.Blameless postmortems
C.Error budget freeze
D.Toil ceiling enforcement
Explanation: Servers that are each unique and irreproducible are called 'snowflakes.' They are an SRE anti-pattern because they cannot be safely rebuilt from infrastructure as code, which blocks automation, recovery, and scaling. The cure is to treat servers as cattle rather than pets and rebuild them from declarative configuration.
3On-call engineers complain they are paged hundreds of times per shift, most of which are noise. Which SRE anti-pattern is this?
A.Alert fatigue from poorly tuned thresholds and non-actionable alerts
B.Excessive automation
C.Strict SLO enforcement
D.Over-investment in observability
Explanation: Alert fatigue happens when alerts are not user-impacting, lack clear actions, or trigger on noisy thresholds. The SRE Practitioner syllabus stresses that every page should be actionable and tied to an SLO or user-affecting symptom; otherwise responders learn to ignore alerts and real incidents are missed.
4A team repeatedly fixes the same recurring pager symptom by restarting a service rather than investigating root cause. Which anti-pattern is this?
A.Point-fix culture that masks systemic issues
B.Postmortem-driven engineering
C.Capacity-led design
D.Service-level objective ownership
Explanation: Repeatedly applying surface-level fixes without addressing systemic causes is a classic SRE anti-pattern. The Practitioner syllabus contrasts this 'point-fix' culture with engineering-led reliability work where every recurrence triggers a postmortem and a real corrective action item.
5Which behavior is the clearest sign that a postmortem culture has slipped into an anti-pattern?
A.Postmortems publicly assign individual blame for human error
B.Postmortems include a timeline and contributing factors
C.Postmortems are shared across teams for organizational learning
D.Postmortems generate prioritized action items with owners
Explanation: Blameful postmortems are an explicit SRE anti-pattern. The Practitioner curriculum, drawing on the Google SRE book, emphasizes that humans operate inside flawed systems and that punishing individuals reduces psychological safety and information sharing. Healthy postmortems are blameless, focus on systemic causes, and produce concrete corrective actions.
6An organization measures SRE success only by the number of incidents resolved per week. Why is this metric an anti-pattern?
A.It rewards firefighting and discourages eliminating the underlying causes of incidents
B.It is too closely aligned with SLOs
C.It puts too much emphasis on engineering work over toil
D.It requires too much instrumentation to compute
Explanation: Incentivizing 'tickets closed' rewards heroics and reactive work. The SRE Practitioner syllabus warns that good SRE metrics measure reliability outcomes (SLO attainment, error budget burn, toil reduction) rather than activity, since activity-based metrics encourage keeping problems alive instead of eliminating them.
7Which situation best describes the 'hero culture' anti-pattern in SRE?
A.Reliability depends on a small group of people who are paged for every major incident
B.On-call rotations are large and balanced across teams
C.Runbooks are versioned and reviewed regularly
D.New hires shadow experienced responders before going on-call
Explanation: When reliability hinges on a few heroes, the system has high key-person risk, slow recovery when those people are unavailable, and burnout. The SRE Practitioner curriculum treats hero culture as an organizational anti-pattern; the cure is broad on-call distribution, runbooks, and shared knowledge.
8Why is treating SRE as 'just an ops team that codes a little' considered an anti-pattern?
A.It loses the engineering ratio that makes SRE different — sustainable reliability requires capping toil and investing in long-term improvements
B.It increases the number of available SRE certifications
C.It is forbidden by ITIL
D.It conflicts with cloud cost governance
Explanation: The Google SRE model recommends a toil ceiling (commonly 50%) so engineers retain time for systemic improvement. If SRE collapses into ops with scripting, the engineering capacity disappears and reliability stops scaling. The Practitioner syllabus describes this drift as a structural anti-pattern.
9Which is an SRE organizational anti-pattern often surfaced during scaling?
A.A central SRE team is the only group allowed to deploy or operate production services
B.Service teams own their SLOs with consultative SRE support
C.SRE engages new services through a defined onboarding model
D.SRE can hand a service back when reliability targets are not met
Explanation: Centralizing all production operations inside a single SRE team creates a bottleneck and removes service-team accountability for reliability. The SRE Practitioner syllabus instead recommends shared ownership, defined engagement models, and the ability for SRE to hand back services that are unsustainable.
10A team treats every incident as 'high severity' to ensure leadership visibility. Why is this an anti-pattern?
A.Severity inflation devalues real high-severity incidents and exhausts responders, undermining incident command effectiveness
B.It violates GDPR
C.It causes SLOs to become more ambitious
D.It requires AIOps to function
Explanation: The Practitioner curriculum, leaning on Incident Command System practice, warns that severity inflation flattens prioritization, burns out responders, and erodes trust in the severity scale. Severity should reflect customer impact and required response, not political visibility.

About the SRE Practitioner Exam

The SRE Practitioner certification validates advanced Site Reliability Engineering practice: SRE anti-patterns, SLO governance and error budgets, secure and reliable distributed-system design, full-stack observability, platform engineering, AIOps and DataOps, incident response management, chaos engineering, and SRE as a concrete implementation of DevOps. The exam is open-book, scenario-driven, and intended for candidates who already understand SRE Foundation concepts.

Questions

40 scored questions

Time Limit

90 minutes

Passing Score

65% (26/40)

Exam Fee

Approximately $279 USD (DevOps Institute / PeopleCert)

SRE Practitioner Exam Content Outline

12.5%

SRE Anti-Patterns

Common SRE adoption failures and their cures: rebadged ops, snowflake servers, alert fatigue, point-fix culture, hero culture, blameful postmortems, severity inflation, observability hoarding, and operating-model mistakes.

12.5%

SLO is the Proxy for Customer Happiness

User-centric SLI design, SLO targeting, error-budget math and policy, multi-window multi-burn-rate alerts, third-party dependency analysis, and translating availability targets into actionable governance.

20%

Building Secure and Reliable Systems

Design for failure, rate limiting, circuit breakers, retries with jitter, graceful degradation, load shedding, immutable infrastructure, zero-trust identity, defense in depth, queueing-theory intuition, and reliability economics.

12.5%

Full Stack Observability

Logs, metrics, and traces; RED, USE, and Four Golden Signals; OpenTelemetry and W3C Trace Context; tail-based sampling; structured logging; observability-driven development; tail latency; high-cardinality debugging.

15%

Using Platform Engineering & AIOps

Platform engineering and Internal Developer Platforms, paved-road defaults, Value Stream Management with DORA metrics, AIOps correlation and anomaly detection, DataOps, generative AI guardrails, and closed-loop remediation.

10%

SRE & Incident Response Management

ICS-style incident command roles, OODA loop, swarming versus tiered escalation, MTTD/MTTR/MTBF, blameless postmortems with tracked actions, severity levels, runbooks, communications discipline, and cross-incident learning.

10%

Chaos Engineering

Principles of Chaos Engineering, hypothesis-driven experiments, steady-state measurement, blast-radius minimization, GameDays, Chaos Monkey, Chaos Mesh, LitmusChaos, Gremlin, AWS FIS, and security chaos engineering.

7.5%

SRE is the Purest Form of DevOps

SRE as concrete DevOps implementation, embedded versus central operating models, DORA metric pairs, executive business case, transformation lessons, and case-study patterns from public postmortems and adoption stories.

How to Pass the SRE Practitioner Exam

What You Need to Know

  • Passing score: 65% (26/40)
  • Exam length: 40 questions
  • Time limit: 90 minutes
  • Exam fee: Approximately $279 USD

Keys to Passing

  • Complete 500+ practice questions
  • Score 80%+ consistently before scheduling
  • Focus on highest-weighted sections
  • Use our AI tutor for tough concepts

SRE Practitioner Study Tips from Top Performers

1Prioritize the 20% 'Building Secure and Reliable Systems' module — practice circuit breakers, retries with jitter, graceful degradation, load shedding, and zero-trust identity in scenario form.
2Treat error budgets as a governance mechanism, not just a formula; many questions hinge on release-pacing decisions when budgets are healthy versus exhausted.
3Memorize the multi-window multi-burn-rate alert pattern from the Google SRE workbook because it shows up in scenario questions about SLO defense.
4Distinguish observability frameworks (RED, USE, Four Golden Signals) and know which one to apply to a request-driven service versus a resource.
5Know the principles of chaos engineering by name (steady-state, hypothesis, production-like, minimize blast radius) — case-study questions reward exact alignment.
6Practice the SRE anti-patterns catalogue (rebadged ops, snowflakes, hero culture, severity inflation) so you recognize them quickly under exam time pressure.
7Review the modern AIOps and platform-engineering vocabulary (paved roads, IDPs, closed-loop remediation, DataOps) because Module 5 weights 15% and is heavy on terminology.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the SRE Practitioner passing score?

The SRE Practitioner exam requires 65% to pass, which equals 26 correct answers out of 40. The exam is multiple-choice and scheduled for 90 minutes through PeopleCert online proctoring.

How many questions are on the SRE Practitioner exam?

The current SRE Practitioner exam uses 40 multiple-choice questions delivered in 90 minutes. The official blueprint distributes those questions across eight advanced modules, with the heaviest weight on building secure and reliable systems (20%).

Is the SRE Practitioner exam open book?

Yes. Current official DevOps Institute and PeopleCert materials describe the SRE Practitioner exam as open book. Success depends less on memorizing definitions and more on quickly recognizing which SRE practice fits a given scenario.

What is the SRE Practitioner exam fee?

The PeopleCert exam voucher for SRE Practitioner is published at approximately US$279, with pricing varying by region and promotion. Confirm current pricing directly with PeopleCert before scheduling.

Do I need SRE Foundation before SRE Practitioner?

PeopleCert lists no formal prerequisite, but DevOps Institute strongly recommends SRE Foundation first. Practitioner content assumes you already understand SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, toil, and the basic SRE operating model.

How long should I study for SRE Practitioner?

Most candidates plan 30-50 focused study hours after SRE Foundation. The fastest route is to lock in error-budget math, master the high-weight 'Building Secure and Reliable Systems' module, and run timed 40-question simulations under open-book conditions.