100+ Free New Relic Reliability Engineer Practice Questions

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Question 1

Score: 0/0

Which acronym describes the SRE building blocks for reliability targets?

SLI / SLO / SLA

TCP / IP / DNS

HTTP / SMTP / FTP

CPU / RAM / NIC

to track

2026 Statistics

Key Facts: New Relic Reliability Engineer Exam

Exam Questions

New Relic

70%

Passing Score

New Relic

120 min

Exam Duration

New Relic

$350

Exam Fee

New Relic (USD)

2 years

Validity

New Relic

2+ years

Recommended Experience

New Relic

The REP exam has approximately 70 multiple-choice and scenario-based questions in 120 minutes with a 70% passing score. Online proctored. Valid for 2 years. The exam fee is approximately $350 USD. Designed for engineers with 2+ years of performance/SRE experience using New Relic.

Sample New Relic Reliability Engineer Practice Questions

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

1Which acronym describes the SRE building blocks for reliability targets?

A.SLI / SLO / SLA

B.TCP / IP / DNS

C.HTTP / SMTP / FTP

D.CPU / RAM / NIC

Explanation: SLI (indicator), SLO (objective/target), and SLA (external contract) form the SRE reliability stack — a foundation for error budgets and burn-rate alerts.

2What is an error budget?

A.1 minus the SLO target — the acceptable amount of unreliability

B.CPU usage

C.Number of users

D.Annual cost

Explanation: Error budget = 1 - SLO. For 99.9% over 28 days, ~40 minutes. Burning the budget should trigger remediation, not feature work.

3What is toil per Google SRE?

A.Manual, repetitive, automatable work that scales linearly with service growth

B.Engineering creativity

C.Code review

D.Postmortem writing

Explanation: Toil is operational work that is manual, repetitive, automatable, and scales with size. SRE teams aim to keep toil <50% of time.

4Which SRE metric measures time from incident start to alert?

A.MTTD (Mean Time To Detect)

B.MTTR

C.MTBF

D.SLA

Explanation: MTTD is the time between problem onset and detection. Strong observability and SLO burn-rate alerts reduce MTTD.

5Which SRE metric measures time from detection to recovery?

A.MTTR (Mean Time To Resolve)

B.MTTD

C.SLA

D.Apdex

Explanation: MTTR captures the time to restore service after detection. Runbooks, automation, and chaos drills reduce it.

6Which SRE practice is essential after every major incident?

A.Blameless postmortem with action items

B.Public blame email

C.Ignore

D.Increase capacity blindly

Explanation: Blameless postmortems focus on system causes, not people. They produce shareable timelines, root causes, and durable action items.

7Which is the right way to define an availability SLI in New Relic?

A.NRQL ratio: good_events / total_events (e.g., requests with status < 500)

B.Just count of 5xx

C.CPU percentage

D.Disk usage

Explanation: Service Levels in New Relic uses NRQL good/total. For availability, good = (status < 500). Pair with a latency SLI for end-to-end coverage.

8Which SLO window is recommended for stable burn-rate alerting?

A.28-day or 30-day rolling window

B.1 minute

C.1 second

D.Annual

Explanation: 28- or 30-day rolling windows balance signal stability with actionable burn-rate timing. Shorter windows are noisy; longer windows hide regressions.

9Which Google SRE alerting pattern uses two windows to balance speed and noise?

A.Multi-window multi-burn-rate

B.Single threshold

C.Manual paging

D.Daily digest

Explanation: Multi-window multi-burn-rate uses a fast window (e.g., 1h) AND a confirming short window (5m) — both must breach to page. Reduces false positives.

10Which burn rate over 1 hour is the standard 'fast burn' threshold (consumes 2% of monthly budget)?

A.14.4x

B.1x

C.100x

D.0.1x

Explanation: Per Google's SRE Workbook, 14.4x burn over 1h consumes 2% of a 30-day budget. 6x over 6h consumes 5%. These are the canonical fast/slow burn pages.

About the New Relic Reliability Engineer Exam

The New Relic Certified Reliability Engineer - Professional (REP) validates expertise in implementing observability for scalable, complex, distributed systems and proactively tracking, monitoring, and improving their reliability. It covers SRE principles, Service Level Management, alerts and incident management, infrastructure, cloud integration, networking, and automation, with emphasis on reducing MTTR and improving service uptime.

Questions

70 scored questions

Time Limit

120 minutes

Passing Score

70%

Exam Fee

$350 (New Relic / Credly Verified)

New Relic Reliability Engineer Exam Content Outline

20-25%

SRE Principles & Service Level Management

SLI / SLO / SLA, error budgets, toil reduction, MTTR/MTTD/MTTA, blameless postmortems, error-budget policies, multi-window multi-burn-rate alerts (1h+5m fast burn, 6h+30m slow burn)

20-25%

Incident Management & Workflows

Errors Inbox triage, war rooms, incident commander roles, on-call rotations (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, ServiceNow, Slack), Workflows for routing/enrichment, mute rules, issue correlation, severity matrices

10-15%

Distributed System Reliability Patterns

Cascading failures, circuit breakers, retries with exponential backoff and jitter, bulkheads, timeouts, idempotency, graceful shutdown/degradation, leader election, sagas

10-15%

Kubernetes & Cloud Reliability

Pixie auto-instrumentation, OOMKilled detection, pod eviction analysis, control-plane monitoring, HPA/VPA/Cluster Autoscaler, multi-region failover, CDN incidents

10-15%

Change Management & Chaos Engineering

Deploy markers, Change Tracking, canary deploys, feature flags (LaunchDarkly/Split), automated rollback, chaos engineering with Gremlin/AWS FIS/Chaos Mesh, GameDay exercises

10-15%

AI Monitoring, AppSec & Data Reliability

AI Monitoring for LLM workloads (token cost, hallucination, RAG quality), AppSec for runtime vulnerability scanning, telemetry ingest reliability, NRQL validation queries

How to Pass the New Relic Reliability Engineer Exam

What You Need to Know

Passing score: 70%
Exam length: 70 questions
Time limit: 120 minutes
Exam fee: $350

Keys to Passing

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

New Relic Reliability Engineer Study Tips from Top Performers

1Master SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and Google's multi-window multi-burn-rate alerting (14.4x over 1h, 6x over 6h)

2Define an availability SLI in NRQL: percentage(count(*), WHERE response.status < 500) FROM Transaction

3Practice Workflows: filter by tag.team, enrich with deploy info and runbook URL, route to PagerDuty

4Know the resilience patterns: circuit breakers, retries with exponential backoff + jitter, bulkheads, timeouts, idempotency

5Understand Kubernetes reliability signals: OOMKilled, eviction events, control-plane health (API server p99, etcd write latency)

6Run a chaos drill with Chaos Mesh or AWS FIS; observe blast radius in New Relic

7Study AI Monitoring: token cost, latency per model, RAG retrieval recall, hallucination detection

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the New Relic Reliability Engineer Professional exam?

The REP is a Professional-level New Relic certification for engineers responsible for managing the uptime and reliability of complex distributed systems. It validates the ability to implement New Relic observability for scalable systems and proactively track, monitor, and improve reliability through SLOs, burn-rate alerts, runbook automation, and chaos engineering.

How many questions are on the REP exam?

The REP exam typically has around 70 questions (multiple-choice and scenario-based) to be completed in 120 minutes. The passing score is approximately 70%. The exam is delivered online with proctoring via Webassessor.

Are there prerequisites for the REP exam?

No formal prerequisites, but New Relic recommends 2+ years of performance analysis and site reliability engineering experience using New Relic. The Verified Foundation (NVF) and APM Practitioner (APA) certifications are strongly recommended. Completing the official REP Exam Prep Course is highly recommended.

What is the cost of the REP exam?

The REP exam fee is approximately $350 USD when paid directly. New Relic occasionally offers vouchers after completing the official Exam Prep Course. Check learn.newrelic.com for current pricing and promotions.

How should I prepare for the REP exam?

Plan for 40-60 hours of study over 4-8 weeks. Use the FREE New Relic REP Exam Prep Course. Build hands-on experience: define SLIs/SLOs in Service Levels, configure multi-window multi-burn-rate alerts, set up Workflows to PagerDuty/Slack, run a chaos drill with Gremlin or Chaos Mesh, and instrument an LLM workload with AI Monitoring. Aim for 80%+ on practice questions.

Does the REP certification expire?

Yes — New Relic certifications are valid for 2 years. Re-certify by retaking the REP exam to stay current with new platform features, including AI Monitoring and AppSec capabilities.