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Objective 3.3

PCDE

Mitigating incident impact on users

Objective 3.3 sits in Applying site reliability engineering practices, which carries 18% of the Cloud DevOps Engineer exam. The questions below are original, written from the official objective title above, and each explanation cites the Google Cloud page it rests on.

Objective title verbatim from the official objectives. Google Cloud exam page ↗

A worked example

Shown solved, with the whole explanation open: this is what every question here carries.

3-3Applying site reliability engineering practices

During an incident, an engineer deploys a fix from their own terminal without telling anyone. Which rule did they break?

Only the incident commander may deploy changesCommand structures the response and delegates; it is not the role that applies changes.
Only the planning lead may file production bugsFiling bugs sits with planning, but that is a bookkeeping duty rather than a deploy gate.
Only the operations team modifies the systemCorrect · your answerCorrect: a single set of hands touches production.
Only the communications role may email stakeholdersStakeholder updates are indeed one role's job, and a deploy is not a stakeholder update.

Correct.

Concept

During an outage the set of hands touching production has to be small and known, or nobody can reason about what changed. Well-meant independent action is the failure mode here, not malice.

Why C

One group is designated to apply operational tools, and everyone else works through it. Uncoordinated changes are what turned the worked example from a bad afternoon into a total outage.

Source

The Ops lead works with the incident commander to respond to the incident by applying operational tools to the task at hand. The operations team should be the only group modifying the system during an incident.

Google SRE Book: Managing Incidents, checked August 2026
#sre#incident-management#roles

Now you: objective 3.3 questions

No account needed. The explanation opens when you answer.

Sample question 1 of 3

3-3Applying site reliability engineering practices

A team declares an incident and names only a commander. Who holds the operations and communications roles?

Sample question 2 of 3

3-3Applying site reliability engineering practices

An engineer in an incident role finds their own load unmanageable. Whom do they ask for extra people?

Sample question 3 of 3

3-3Applying site reliability engineering practices

A team asks what the single most important responsibility of an incident commander is. Which one is it?

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Read the sources

These are the official pages the questions above cite. Reading them is studying the objective from the primary source, which is what the explanations point you toward anyway.

More objectives in Applying site reliability engineering practices