Design a company-wide monitoring system
Company: LinkedIn
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
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)
Overview: 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.