These questions are pretty sysadminny. Just "how do you configure these open source tools to set up and monitor a service". Not representative of what Google SRE technical interviews are like. I wouldn't feel confident that somebody who had passed just this part of the interview would be a good oncall during an emergency.

Agreed that it's challenging to determine from an interview how someone will respond to a site outage, but site reliability engineering involves more than just being oncall--it's about the decisions you make in setting up interoperating services and the infrastructure you put in place to allow for straightforward scaling.

In general I'm a big fan of this sort of interviewing because the work the person did on the server can give you great insights into what sort of systems administrator they are--do they give you a good insight into how the system has been altered from the default install? Do they document the "why" of any changes they made? Were they able to craft a readable shell/python/ruby/whatever script to cover any automated processes they had to hack together?

I don't know what Google SRE technical interviews are like, but I can't imagine a one-on-one giving as many useful insights for an entire team as the artifacts left behind by someone setting up an entire server from scratch.

Not to mention the ability to weed out people who don't have the basics in place--when someone can't even figure out how to ssh to the server, you know pretty readily that they're probably not suited to the work.