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Exam Review

Key Facts: SRE Practitioner Exam

40 MCQ

Official Questions

PeopleCert current certification page

26/40

Passing Score

PeopleCert: 65%

90 min

Exam Duration

PeopleCert

Open book

Exam Format

PeopleCert

Highly recommended

SRE Foundation Preparation

Official DevOps Institute v1.2 examination requirements

3 years

Renewal Interval

PeopleCert current certification page

GenAI

Current Automation Coverage

PeopleCert current certification page and v1.3 material update

SRE Practitioner has 40 multiple-choice questions, 90 minutes, an open-book format, and a 65% pass mark (26/40). SRE Foundation and accredited Practitioner training are highly recommended. The published v1.2 requirements list eight modules with maximum question counts of 5/5/8/5/6/4/4/3; those historical weights should not be mistaken for a newly published v1.3 weighting table. Current PeopleCert coverage includes GenAI automation, platform engineering, and Value Stream Management. Certification renewal is every three years; pricing varies by region and package.

Sample SRE Practitioner Practice Questions

Try these sample questions to review concepts for the SRE Practitioner exam. Each question includes a detailed explanation. Start the interactive quiz above for the full 188+ question experience with AI tutoring.

1A renamed SRE team still closes the same manual request queue and has no time allocated to engineering. Which change best addresses the underlying adoption problem?
A.Agree a service improvement backlog and protect engineering capacity.
B.Move the queue to a new incident-management tool.
C.Give each engineer a weekly ticket-completion target.
D.Require an SRE approval on each product release.
Explanation: Changing the operating model requires authority and time to improve services, not just a new team name. A shared backlog makes reliability work an explicit product tradeoff.
2A failed server cannot be rebuilt from the standard image because its local fixes were never recorded. What should the recovery improvement address?
A.Reproduce required configuration in a tested, versioned build.
B.Take a fresh disk snapshot after each manual repair.
C.Assign one engineer to maintain a separate notebook per host.
D.Keep the same server identity through the next hardware refresh.
Explanation: Reproducible configuration reduces dependence on unique servers. Validate rebuilt instances and migrate any persistent data deliberately; rebuilding does not itself protect state.
3Most overnight pages resolve before responders act; a few require urgent mitigation. Which change is most likely to improve paging precision without discarding useful detection?
A.Review actions and impact, then route nonurgent signals to tickets.
B.Raise every alert threshold by the same percentage.
C.Keep thresholds but lengthen every alert delay to one hour.
D.Send all current pages to a smaller specialist rotation.
Explanation: Paging should justify immediate human action. Review individual signals, including imminent risks, and separate urgent notifications from work that can wait.
4Restarting a leaking worker restores service, but the same incident returns every week. What should the team do after the current recovery?
A.Track a leak investigation and verify a durable mitigation.
B.Replace the restart command with a faster script and close the problem.
C.Increase the paging delay so a scheduled restart can run first.
D.Add a second responder to the same restart procedure.
Explanation: A restart may be an appropriate immediate mitigation. Recurrent failures also need engineering follow-up, an owner, and evidence that the chosen change works.
5Which postmortem sentence best supports learning about a mistaken production command?
A.The console defaulted to production; the review did not display the target.
B.The operator was insufficiently careful despite having completed training.
C.The incident would have been avoided if a more experienced engineer had acted.
D.The command owner should accept responsibility for the resulting downtime.
Explanation: A factual account of defaults, information, and controls helps identify improvements without treating a person as the root cause. Blameless analysis still records actions accurately.
6Managers reward the number of operational tickets closed. Engineers avoid an automation project that would remove most tickets. Which incentive change addresses this conflict?
A.Measure reduced recurring work alongside service outcomes.
B.Increase the ticket quota for engineers with automation skills.
C.Count each script execution as a manually closed ticket.
D.Reward the shortest average ticket handling time alone.
Explanation: Activity counts are incomplete proxies for engineering value. Evaluate sustained toil reduction with reliability and user outcomes so fewer tickets can represent success.
7Only one engineer understands a critical recovery procedure. What is the most useful test of whether this dependency has been reduced?
A.Another trained responder completes a supervised recovery exercise.
B.The expert publishes a detailed recovery document without another responder trying it.
C.The team adds the expert as a secondary contact on every shift.
D.Every responder acknowledges reading the recovery document.
Explanation: Shared documentation, training, and exercises reduce reliance on a single expert. A supervised exercise provides evidence of usable knowledge transfer.
8An SRE group automates ticket handling but receives more manual requests each month. Which measurement best tests whether the automation creates lasting engineering capacity?
A.Recurring operating hours per service as demand grows.
B.Number of automation scripts added to the repository.
C.Percentage of requests acknowledged within five minutes.
D.Number of operational tickets accepted by the group.
Explanation: Toil often grows with service scale. Measure the resulting work, including automation maintenance, to determine whether capacity is actually being freed.
9One central SRE reviewer must manually approve every low-risk deployment, and the queue delays fixes. Which change best preserves reliability assurance while reducing the bottleneck?
A.Automate agreed checks and escalate exceptions to review.
B.Add another signature after the SRE reviewer approves.
C.Group all releases into a monthly approval meeting.
D.Require developers to attach longer release summaries.
Explanation: Routine, well-understood criteria can be checked consistently in the delivery path. Novel or failed checks still need appropriate human judgment and ownership.
10Teams label routine requests as major incidents because only major incidents receive quick attention. Which intervention addresses the organizational cause?
A.Agree service priorities and response routes for routine demand.
B.Publish stricter severity definitions without improving routine response routes.
C.Require a director to confirm each severity selection.
D.Route every routine request through the major-incident queue.
Explanation: Severity inflation can reflect a broken prioritization process. Define impact-based severity and a workable route for nonincident requests rather than rewarding escalation.

About the SRE Practitioner Exam

SRE Practitioner assesses knowledge, comprehension, and application of advanced reliability practices: anti-patterns, SLOs, secure and reliable systems, observability, platform engineering, AIOps and DataOps, incident response, chaos engineering, and SRE as a form of DevOps. Current PeopleCert coverage includes GenAI automation. SRE Foundation is highly recommended, not a mandatory credential in the checked official requirements.

Exam sponsor: DevOps Institute / PeopleCert. The requirements and fees below concern the certification or admission exam, separate from our free practice resources.

Assessment

40 multiple-choice questions in a 90-minute open-book exam; 65% (26 correct answers) is required to pass. Published v1.2 requirements cover eight modules; current PeopleCert material also includes GenAI automation.

Time Limit

90 minutes

Passing Score

65% (26/40)

Exam / Certification Fees

Pricing varies by region, currency, package, and provider. Confirm the current price with PeopleCert; a universal USD price was not verified.

Exam sponsor website

Fees, eligibility, and exam policies can change. Confirm them with the exam sponsor before applying or paying.

Official sources

Our practice resources: topics covered

We aim to reflect publicly available exam outlines and topic information in our study resources. Coverage, format, and difficulty may differ from the actual exam, and we cannot guarantee that every detail is accurate or current. Confirm exam requirements, fees, and policies with the official exam sponsor.

12.5% (v1.2 requirements)

SRE Anti-Patterns

Recognizing common SRE adoption failures: rebadged ops, snowflake servers, alert fatigue, point-fix culture, hero culture, blameful postmortems, and severity inflation.

12.5% (v1.2 requirements)

SLO is the Proxy for Customer Happiness

Designing user-centric SLIs and SLOs, error budgets and policies, multi-window multi-burn-rate alerts, dependency analysis, and rolling-window reliability targets.

20% (v1.2 requirements)

Building Secure and Reliable Systems

Resilience patterns (rate limiting, circuit breakers, retries with jitter, graceful degradation, load shedding), zero-trust identity, defense in depth, immutable infrastructure, and reliability economics.

12.5% (v1.2 requirements)

Full Stack Observability

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

15% (v1.2 requirements)

Using Platform Engineering & AIOps

Platform engineering, Internal Developer Platforms, Value Stream Management, AIOps and DataOps, and current PeopleCert coverage of GenAI for automation, incident response, and reliability.

10% (v1.2 requirements)

SRE & Incident Response Management

Incident Command roles, OODA loop, swarming, MTTD/MTTR/MTBF, blameless postmortems, severity classification, runbooks, communications discipline, and cross-incident learning.

10% (v1.2 requirements)

Chaos Engineering

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

7.5% (v1.2 requirements)

SRE is a Form of DevOps

SRE as concrete DevOps implementation, organizational scaling models (embedded SRE, central platform), DORA metrics, executive narratives, and successful transformation patterns.

Preparing for the SRE Practitioner Exam

What You Need to Know

  • Passing score: 65% (26/40)
  • Assessment: 40 multiple-choice questions in a 90-minute open-book exam; 65% (26 correct answers) is required to pass. Published v1.2 requirements cover eight modules; current PeopleCert material also includes GenAI automation.
  • Time limit: 90 minutes
  • Exam / certification fees: Pricing varies by region, currency, package, and provider. Confirm the current price with PeopleCert; a universal USD price was not verified. Official sources

Using Our Practice Resources

  • Work through all 188 available questions
  • Review every answer and explanation
  • Track weak areas and revisit them
  • Use our AI tutor for tough concepts

SRE Practitioner: Suggested Study Strategy

1Prioritize 'Building Secure and Reliable Systems' (up to 8/40 in the published v1.2 requirements) — 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.
3Distinguish observability frameworks (RED, USE, Four Golden Signals) and know which one to apply to a request-driven service versus a resource.
4Learn the published chaos principles, including “Run Experiments in Production” and “Minimize Blast Radius”. Production realism is a goal, not blanket permission: obtain authorization for a defined scope, rehearse where appropriate, establish readiness and stop conditions, and validate containment and recovery before production exposure. Define user-relevant steady state and a hypothesis, vary realistic events, and automate validated experiments.
5Practice the SRE anti-patterns catalogue (rebadged ops, snowflakes, hero culture, severity inflation) so you recognize them quickly under exam time pressure.
6Review the modern AIOps and platform-engineering vocabulary (paved roads, IDPs, closed-loop remediation, DataOps) alongside the current GenAI automation coverage.
7Practice burn-rate arithmetic with explicit assumptions: a fully unused, fixed 30-day time budget consumed steadily at 14x with no replenishment lasts 30/14 days, about 51.43 hours. Burn 1x describes consumption at the SLO-allowed rate, not the remaining allowance or overall progress; account separately for prior consumption and rolling-window replenishment. Request-based exhaustion estimates also need explicit eligible-population and traffic-rate assumptions; do not infer their duration from the multiplier alone.
8Distinguish MTTD, MTTR, MTBF, and MTTF precisely; SREP scenarios often hinge on which metric is being measured and which lever improves it
9Know all three pillars of observability and when each is the right tool: metrics for aggregates, logs for events, traces for request paths across services
10For platform engineering questions, anchor on the primary benefit: eliminating fragmentation and inconsistency across teams, not just 'making things faster'
11Study the SRE engagement model: PRR for onboarding, offboarding/handback for mature services, consulting model for scale without embedding
12Review the current PeopleCert GenAI automation and Value Stream Management content; the public v1.2 guide predates the English v1.3 update.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the SRE Practitioner passing score?

65%, equal to 26 correct answers out of 40 multiple-choice questions.

How many questions are on the SRE Practitioner exam?

PeopleCert currently lists 40 multiple-choice questions with a 90-minute duration.

Is SRE Practitioner open book?

Yes. PeopleCert currently lists the exam as open book. Follow its current rules for using Official Training Materials.

Is SRE Foundation certification mandatory?

The official DevOps Institute examination requirements call SRE Foundation certification highly recommended. They do not state that holding Foundation is mandatory; approved Practitioner training is also highly recommended.

What does the exam cover?

Eight published modules cover anti-patterns, SLOs, secure and reliable systems, full-stack observability, platform engineering and AIOps, incident response, chaos engineering, and SRE as a form of DevOps. Current PeopleCert coverage also includes GenAI automation.

What topics have the largest published weights?

The official v1.2 requirements assign up to 8 of 40 questions to Building Secure and Reliable Systems and 6 to Platform Engineering and AIOps. Those historical counts are not a newly published v1.3 weighting table; use current training materials for current coverage.

What is the examination fee?

Confirm the current regional and package price with PeopleCert. A universal USD amount was not verified.

How long should I study?

OpenExamPrep suggests 30–60 focused hours over 4–8 weeks for candidates familiar with Foundation concepts. This is a planning estimate, not an official preparation requirement.

How is Practitioner different from Foundation?

Practitioner develops advanced reliability practice and tests knowledge, comprehension, and application. The official requirements include recall and understanding as well as applied questions; it is not exclusively scenario based.