Interview questions for Monitoring Engineers (2020 edition)

What are the questions that you should ask when hiring a monitoring engineer in the year 2020!

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For full disclosure, I have hired people into the role of Monitoring Engineering and have done it successfully as the guys who have ended up in the given position are still there. And they’re shining at what they do.

So here are my (and Rasmus Rüngenen’s) questions you should ask from any engineer that you would hire to fill in the monitoring bits and pieces for your company.

I will formulate the questions and answers like this:

Question?
- What are you looking for in the answer

1. What would you measure to make sure the service has good health?
   - Is the person detail-oriented or just wants to get the overall health of the service and receive a broader vision for the whole company. Given the answer, you must decide what would matter the most for yourself.
2. Are you more inclined to use Open-Source tooling for monitoring or SaaS platforms? Explain why.
   - This will give you a great indication for what the interviewee is willing to do — either he/she will be super hands-on with all the on-premises tooling or want’s to go for the easy way out and use any SaaS platform…