Design a user behavior monitoring system
Company: Rippling
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
## System Design: User Behavior Monitoring System
You are asked to design a monitoring/analytics system that collects **user behavior events** from clients (e.g., **app install**, **user clicks**, etc.). The system must support:
### Functional requirements
1. **Real-time monitoring**: show near-real-time metrics on dashboards (e.g., installs per minute, click-through rate).
2. **Raw event retention**: store **raw events** for large **offline/batch jobs** (e.g., daily/weekly aggregation, deeper analysis).
3. **Metric discovery/confirmation**: you should clarify with the interviewer which exact product metrics are needed (assume multiple counters/ratios, grouped by dimensions like platform/app version/country).
### Non-functional requirements (assume typical expectations)
- Handle **high write throughput** (many clients emitting events).
- **Low-latency** updates for dashboards (seconds-level is acceptable unless otherwise specified).
- **Scalable** storage and compute.
- **Reasonable correctness** for aggregates (be explicit about tradeoffs: at-least-once vs exactly-once, late events).
### Out of scope
- System/infra observability metrics like host reliability/latency are **not required** unless you want to briefly mention them.
Design the architecture, key components, data flow, storage choices, and how you compute/serve real-time metrics vs offline analytics.
Overview: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to design scalable, low-latency user event ingestion and analytics pipelines while reasoning about data storage choices and aggregate correctness trade-offs.
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Community answers
Answer by hrlzmyy
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