Troubleshooting Assessment: Sample Questions | Bryq
Beginner
Intermediate
Advanced
These are three sample questions from Bryq’s Troubleshooting assessment, a technical test for hiring IT support specialists, help desk technicians and systems administrators. The full assessment covers three levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced, from core diagnostics to performance monitoring, network diagnostics and system recovery. Each question is multiple choice, with one correct answer out of four options.
Beginner
Intermediate
Question
A Windows laptop shows an IP address beginning with 169.254. What does this usually indicate?
Select your answer
It couldn’t get an address from a DHCP server.
It is connected to a corporate VPN.
Its DNS server isn’t responding.
Another device on the network has the same IP address.
WHY IS THIS THE CORRECT ANSWER
Windows assigns itself a 169.254.x.x address when it can’t reach a DHCP server, which leaves it without a usable network configuration. The next step is to check the cable or Wi-Fi connection and the router’s DHCP service. A DNS problem, by contrast, leaves a valid IP address in place but breaks name resolution.
Intermediate
Intermediate
Question
Users report that a web application is slow only between 9 and 10 am, when most people log in. The server’s CPU usage stays normal, but its disk queue length is very high during that hour. What is the most likely bottleneck?
Select your answer
Disk I/O on the server.
Network bandwidth to the office.
The server’s CPU capacity.
The users’ web browsers.
WHY IS THIS THE CORRECT ANSWER
A consistently high disk queue length means requests are waiting for the storage to respond, which matches a slowdown under peak login load while the CPU stays normal. Improving disk performance, for example through caching, faster storage or optimizing heavy queries, addresses the actual constraint.
Advanced
Intermediate
Question
A service has failed intermittently since last Tuesday, when several configuration changes were deployed at once. What is the most efficient way to isolate the cause?
Select your answer
Test the changes in halves in a staging environment to narrow down which one is responsible.
Reinstall the service from scratch.
Revert all of Tuesday’s changes in production and leave them out.
Wait for more failures, so there are more logs to analyze.
WHY IS THIS THE CORRECT ANSWER
Splitting the changes into halves and testing each half, like a binary search, finds the faulty change in a few steps even when many changes went in together. Doing this in staging avoids further disruption. Reverting everything stops the symptoms but leaves the cause unknown and throws away the changes that worked.
