8 Observability and Automation Testing Free Online FlashCards

What is network telemetry?

Telemetry is network data and the methods used to generate, export, collect, correlate, and use it.

How do push telemetry and polling differ?

Push sends updates when changes occur or at configured intervals, reducing detection delay. Polling supports periodic checks and simple queries.

How do metrics, logs, and traces differ?

Metrics are numeric measurements over time; logs record events; traces follow an operation across components.

What does monitoring do, and what is an SLI?

Monitoring interprets observations against expected behavior. An SLI is a measurable service property, such as reachability, latency, or loss.

What should automation tests check before deployment?

Before deployment, validate inputs and API responses, check syntax, schemas, and policy constraints, and review the intended changes.

What is idempotency in network automation?

Idempotency means repeating the same desired-state automation causes no unintended additional change. It makes retries safer and can expose drift or faulty state handling.

What are the main steps in a network automation feedback loop?

A feedback loop specifies measurable criteria, applies a change, observes telemetry, compares outcomes with criteria, responds to failures, and uses results to improve future automation.

What can telemetry reveal about the three network planes?

Management-plane data describes configuration and device health; control-plane data describes routing state; forwarding-plane data includes traffic, loss, and queue statistics.

Why correlate telemetry signals with device, service, change, and time?

Correlating signals by device, service, change, and time helps connect a symptom to the automation that preceded it.

What makes an alert useful?

Alerts should generally identify service-affecting symptoms, include useful context, and provide a route to diagnostic information—not report every low-level fluctuation.

Why must the monitoring pipeline itself be monitored?

Monitoring its own collectors and alert paths helps reveal when missing observations or broken alerts make a dashboard misleading.

Why test changes in a lab or representative environment?

Testing in a lab or representative environment can expose interactions, failure cases, and platform-specific behavior before broad rollout.