Troubleshoot a production server outage

For the next few days, you are the on-call engineer in charge of a production server. Explain how you would handle each of the following:

• What steps would you take to keep the server operating normally during your on-call period?
• When an incident occurs, how would you work through it from start to finish?
• If user requests hang or take too long to respond, what are the probable causes and how would you narrow them down?
• How would you rapidly find out which programs and services are currently running on the server?
• Which limited server resources are most likely to become bottlenecks?
• If you were advising a non-expert running a website or service, which operational best practices would you suggest to make the system easier to monitor and maintain? Respond as you would in a production engineering or site reliability interview centered on observability, incident response, and basic Linux/server operations. Overview: This question assesses a candidate's skills in observability, incident response, and Linux/server operations, covering how they troubleshoot production outages, isolate sources of latency, identify running processes and services, and recognize finite resource bottlenecks.