Design a high-level logging system
Company: Microsoft
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Design a high-level centralized logging system for a company.
Assume many services (microservices, batch jobs) running across multiple hosts/containers need to emit logs. The system should:
- Ingest logs from many producers.
- Store logs durably with retention.
- Support querying/filtering by time range, service, host, log level, request/trace ID.
- Handle bursts and partial outages.
- Provide basic access control and multi-tenant separation (e.g., by team/environment).
Describe the architecture, key components, data model/indexing strategy, scaling approach, and reliability considerations. No diagram is required, but be clear about data flow.
Quick Answer: This System Design question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, reliable centralized logging and observability infrastructure, covering distributed systems concepts such as ingestion, durable storage, querying/indexing, access control, and multi-tenant separation.