Design a company-wide monitoring system

Q: Design a company-wide monitoring system

This question evaluates skills in designing large-scale observability and monitoring systems, covering telemetry collection (metrics, logs, traces), high-throughput ingestion, storage and scaling strategies, alerting pipelines, and operational trade-offs like cardinality, retention, and backpressure.

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Question

You are asked to design a monitoring system used company-wide.

Goals

Collect and query telemetry for many services/hosts
Support alerting and dashboards for engineers and SREs
Handle high ingestion volume and multi-team usage

Telemetry types to cover

Metrics (time series)
Logs
Distributed traces (optional but strong)

Discuss

Key requirements (SLOs, latency, retention, tenancy)
High-level architecture and data flow
Storage choices and scaling
Alerting pipeline and reliability
Operational concerns (cardinality, cost controls, backpressure)

Design a company-wide monitoring system

Quick Overview

Goals

Telemetry types to cover

Discuss

Solution

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