M5.7 module quiz
Ten questions. 80% to pass (8 of 10). Open book, unlimited retakes.
Answers are collapsed under each question. Answer first, then check.
Q1
Cost becomes a SEV when:
A. Any anomaly fires at all
B. Finance escalates it upward
C. It exceeds the monthly cloud budget that was agreed for that particular team
D. The burn rate or total exposure crosses a stated threshold the org defined in advance
Show answer
Correct: D. Defining it in advance is what makes the declaration uncontroversial at 3 AM, which is exactly when nobody wants to negotiate the criteria.
Q2
The critical early decision in a cost incident is:
A. Who to notify first
B. Kill immediately versus investigate first
C. Which postmortem template the team uses
D. Whether to page the CFO tonight
Show answer
Correct: B. Killing stops the bleeding and destroys the evidence; investigating preserves both and costs money while it runs. The burn rate time-boxes the choice.
Q3
A cost SEV differs from an outage SEV in that:
A. It is inherently less urgent
B. It affects fewer users directly
C. The damage accumulates continuously rather than being binary
D. It requires entirely different tooling in order to detect
Show answer
Correct: C. Which changes the calculus: an outage is equally bad at minute 5 and minute 50, where a cost incident is ten times worse.
Q4
The cost incident commander’s role is to:
A. Fix the problem personally
B. Hold the decision authority and the coordination, so responders are not negotiating
C. Write the postmortem afterwards
D. Notify the external stakeholders and affected customers directly themselves
Show answer
Correct: B. A single commander is what prevents three people simultaneously deciding different things about the same resource.
Q5
The commander’s authority should be:
A. Unlimited within the incident
B. Delegated per incident by finance
C. Held entirely by the FinOps lead at all times, without any exception whatsoever
D. Bounded and stated in advance, including a spend threshold they can act on unilaterally
Show answer
Correct: D. Unbounded authority is unusable because nobody will exercise it, and unstated authority produces a pause at exactly the wrong moment.
Q6
Long-incident handoffs matter because:
A. Shifts have to end somewhere
B. Decision fatigue degrades judgement, and a fatigued commander makes worse calls than a fresh one
C. Time zones across the org
D. Compliance requires a formal written handover between every pair of consecutive shifts
Show answer
Correct: B. The handoff is a control on decision quality rather than a scheduling convenience, which is why it is planned rather than improvised.
Q7
Communication during a cost incident should be tailored to:
A. Each audience: engineering, finance, leadership and security need different things
B. One message sent to everyone
C. Leadership first, and then everyone else in the organisation in turn after that
D. The affected team on its own
Show answer
Correct: A. Finance needs exposure and trajectory; engineering needs cause and action; leadership needs impact and ETA. One message serves none of them well.
Q8
During an incident, the wrong communication move is:
A. Stating clearly what is known and what is not yet known
B. Giving a running exposure figure
C. Naming the next update time
D. Waiting until the cause is confirmed before saying anything
Show answer
Correct: D. Silence during a cost incident gets filled by speculation, and the speculation is usually worse than the situation.
Q9
Cost-aware action items should be:
A. Broad and aspirational in its overall scope
B. Owned by the team collectively
C. SMART, with a single named owner and a date
D. Reviewed annually at a retro
Show answer
Correct: C. Collective ownership is the diffusion failure again, and it is why action items age without closing.
Q10
Action items that never close usually indicate:
A. That the item was written as a wish rather than a bounded task with an owner
B. Laziness on the team’s part
C. Insufficient tooling available to actually carry out the work involved
D. Low severity of the incident
Show answer
Correct: A. “Improve monitoring” cannot be completed. “Add a budget alert on account X at 80% by the 14th, owned by Priya” can.