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100+ Free IBM Cloud Associate SRE Practice Questions

Pass your IBM Certified Associate SRE - Cloud v2 (C1000-169) exam on the first try — instant access, no signup required.

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2026 Statistics

Key Facts: IBM Cloud Associate SRE Exam

65

Exam Questions

IBM

90 min

Exam Duration

IBM

69%

Passing Score

IBM

$200

Exam Fee

IBM

7 sections

Content Domains

IBM exam objectives

Pearson VUE

Exam Provider

IBM

As of May 24, 2026, IBM lists the C1000-169 IBM Certified Associate SRE - Cloud v2 exam as a 65-question multiple-choice exam with a 90-minute time limit, a 69% passing score, and a $200 fee delivered through Pearson VUE. The exam is organized into seven sections: SRE Fundamentals and Terminology (15%), Incident Management and Post-Incident Reviews (12%), Observability (18%), Troubleshooting and Runbooks (19%), Operations (19%), Deployments (9%), and Security on IBM Cloud (8%).

Sample IBM Cloud Associate SRE Practice Questions

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

1What does the discipline of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) primarily apply to operations work?
A.Manual ticket triage performed by a dedicated NOC team
B.Software engineering principles and automation to operate reliable, scalable systems
C.A fixed change-freeze policy that blocks all production deployments
D.Outsourcing of all infrastructure to a managed third party
Explanation: SRE treats operations as a software problem, applying engineering and automation to run systems reliably and at scale. The goal is to reduce manual, repetitive work and to balance reliability with the pace of feature delivery.
2Which definition best describes a Service Level Indicator (SLI)?
A.A contractual penalty paid to customers when targets are missed
B.A quantitative measure of some aspect of the level of service, such as request latency
C.The internal reliability goal the team commits to achieving
D.A list of on-call engineers responsible for an incident
Explanation: An SLI is a carefully defined quantitative measurement of a service attribute, for example the proportion of successful requests or request latency. SLIs are the raw measurements that SLOs and SLAs are built on top of.
3How does a Service Level Objective (SLO) differ from a Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
A.An SLO is a legal contract while an SLA is an internal target
B.An SLO is an internal target value for an SLI while an SLA is an external commitment with consequences
C.They are identical terms used interchangeably
D.An SLO measures cost while an SLA measures latency
Explanation: An SLO is the internal target the team aims to meet for a given SLI, and teams typically set it stricter than any customer-facing promise. An SLA is the external agreement with customers that defines consequences, such as credits, when the service falls below the agreed level.
4If a service has a 99.9% availability SLO over 30 days, approximately how much downtime is the error budget?
A.About 43 minutes
B.About 4.3 hours
C.About 7.2 hours
D.About 14 minutes
Explanation: A 99.9% target allows 0.1% unavailability. Over 30 days (43,200 minutes), 0.1% is about 43 minutes of allowed downtime, which is the error budget for the period.
5What is an error budget in SRE practice?
A.The financial budget allocated to fix production bugs
B.The allowable amount of unreliability defined as 100% minus the SLO
C.The maximum number of engineers that can be on-call at once
D.A cap on the number of features released per quarter
Explanation: An error budget is the acceptable level of failure derived from the SLO, calculated as 100% minus the SLO target. It gives teams a data-driven way to balance reliability against the rate of change; when the budget is exhausted, the team prioritizes reliability work.
6In SRE terminology, what is toil?
A.Any work that requires deep engineering creativity
B.Manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical work that scales linearly with service growth and provides no enduring value
C.The documentation written after an incident
D.The time spent in sprint planning meetings
Explanation: Toil is operational work that is manual, repetitive, automatable, devoid of enduring value, and scales with service size. SRE teams aim to keep toil under control (commonly under 50% of time) so engineers can invest in lasting improvements.
7Google's SRE model commonly recommends capping toil at what proportion of an SRE's time?
A.10%
B.25%
C.50%
D.75%
Explanation: The widely cited SRE guideline is to keep toil below 50% of an engineer's time so that at least half remains for engineering work that improves reliability and reduces future toil. Exceeding this threshold signals the need to automate or offload operational load.
8Why do SRE teams deliberately avoid setting an SLO of 100% availability?
A.Because 100% is impossible to measure with any monitoring tool
B.Because chasing 100% is prohibitively costly and leaves no error budget for change and innovation
C.Because customers always prefer lower availability
D.Because 100% violates cloud provider terms of service
Explanation: A 100% target leaves zero error budget, blocking all risk-bearing changes and demanding extreme cost for diminishing user benefit. SRE intentionally targets a high but achievable level so there is room for feature velocity and planned maintenance.
9Which metric describes the average time to restore service after a failure?
A.MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)
B.MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery/Repair)
C.MTTF (Mean Time To Failure)
D.MTTA (Mean Time To Acknowledge)
Explanation: MTTR is the mean time to recover or repair a service after an incident, a key indicator of operational responsiveness. Lowering MTTR is a core SRE goal achieved through better detection, runbooks, and automation.
10What is the primary purpose of measuring service reliability from the user's perspective?
A.To reduce cloud infrastructure billing
B.Because reliability that users actually experience is what determines satisfaction and SLO compliance
C.To eliminate the need for monitoring agents
D.To satisfy auditors who only review server uptime
Explanation: SRE emphasizes measuring reliability as experienced by users, because backend uptime does not always reflect what users encounter. User-centric SLIs, such as successful requests or end-to-end latency, best capture whether the service meets its objectives.

About the IBM Cloud Associate SRE Exam

The IBM Certified Associate SRE - Cloud v2 exam (C1000-169) validates associate-level skills in site reliability engineering on IBM Cloud. The blueprint spans SRE fundamentals such as SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, and error budgets, plus incident management, observability with IBM Cloud Monitoring and IBM Cloud Logs, troubleshooting and runbooks, operations on Kubernetes and OpenShift, deployments with Tekton toolchains, and security with IBM Cloud IAM and Key Protect.

Questions

65 scored questions

Time Limit

90 minutes

Passing Score

69%

Exam Fee

$200 (IBM)

IBM Cloud Associate SRE Exam Content Outline

15%

SRE Fundamentals and Terminology

Master SLIs, SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, burn rate, toil reduction, reliability metrics like MTTR, and how SRE implements DevOps principles.

12%

Incident Management and Post-Incident Reviews

Understand incident response, severity classification, the incident commander model, on-call and escalation practices, and blameless postmortems with actionable corrective items.

18%

Observability

Know the three pillars of metrics, logs, and traces, the four golden signals, IBM Cloud Monitoring (Sysdig), IBM Cloud Logs (LogDNA), Activity Tracker, OpenTelemetry, and effective alerting.

19%

Troubleshooting and Runbooks

Diagnose failures using telemetry, author and automate runbooks, reduce mean time to detection and recovery, and isolate issues across distributed services.

19%

Operations

Operate Kubernetes and OpenShift workloads, configure autoscaling and health probes, apply Infrastructure as Code with Schematics, plan capacity, and use resilience patterns and chaos engineering.

9%

Deployments

Apply CI/CD with IBM Cloud Continuous Delivery and Tekton toolchains, choose blue-green, canary, and rolling-update strategies, and design safe rollbacks and progressive delivery.

8%

Security on IBM Cloud

Apply least privilege with IBM Cloud IAM and access groups, manage encryption with Key Protect, protect secrets, and use audit logging for compliance.

How to Pass the IBM Cloud Associate SRE Exam

What You Need to Know

  • Passing score: 69%
  • Exam length: 65 questions
  • Time limit: 90 minutes
  • Exam fee: $200

Keys to Passing

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

IBM Cloud Associate SRE Study Tips from Top Performers

1Master the SLI, SLO, SLA, and error-budget relationships, including how to compute allowed downtime from an availability target; these fundamentals underpin many questions.
2Focus the most time on Troubleshooting and Operations, which together are about 38% of the exam, covering runbooks, Kubernetes and OpenShift ops, autoscaling, and resilience patterns.
3Learn the IBM Cloud observability stack precisely: IBM Cloud Monitoring (Sysdig) for metrics and alerts, IBM Cloud Logs (LogDNA) for logging, and Activity Tracker for audit events.
4Know the four golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) and the three pillars of observability (metrics, logs, traces) cold.
5Be able to compare deployment strategies, blue-green, canary, and rolling updates, and explain when each limits blast radius and supports rollback.
6Review IBM Cloud security basics: IAM and access groups, least privilege, Key Protect for encryption keys, secrets management, and audit logging.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the current official exam facts for IBM C1000-169?

IBM lists the IBM Certified Associate SRE - Cloud v2 exam (C1000-169) as a 65-question multiple-choice exam with a 90-minute time limit and a 69% passing score. The exam fee is $200 USD and it is delivered through Pearson VUE.

What topics does the C1000-169 exam cover and how are they weighted?

The exam has seven sections: SRE Fundamentals and Terminology (15%), Incident Management and Post-Incident Reviews (12%), Observability (18%), Troubleshooting and Runbooks (19%), Operations (19%), Deployments (9%), and Security on IBM Cloud (8%). Troubleshooting and Operations are the heaviest areas.

Are there prerequisites for the IBM Cloud Associate SRE certification?

IBM does not require formal prerequisites for C1000-169. It is positioned as an associate-level credential, so foundational SRE and IBM Cloud knowledge is recommended but not mandatory.

Which IBM Cloud observability services appear on the exam?

Expect questions on IBM Cloud Monitoring (based on Sysdig) for metrics and alerting, IBM Cloud Logs (the successor to IBM Log Analysis based on LogDNA) for logging, and Activity Tracker for audit events, alongside the three pillars of metrics, logs, and traces and the four golden signals.

How much does the C1000-169 exam cost and where do I take it?

The exam costs $200 USD and is administered by IBM through Pearson VUE. You register and schedule the proctored exam, which can be taken at a test center or online, through Pearson VUE.

What is the best way to prepare for the IBM Cloud Associate SRE exam?

Start with IBM's associate SRE learning path, then drill mixed practice questions until SLO and error-budget math, observability tooling, and deployment strategies feel routine. Because Troubleshooting and Operations together are 38% of the exam, spend the most time on runbooks, Kubernetes and OpenShift operations, and resilience patterns.