System Design: Distributed Monitoring

A distributed monitoring system collects evidence about service behavior and makes it usable during an incident. This chapter designs the collection, storage, query, and alerting paths, including signals from requests that never reach the backend.

Monitoring

A request can depend on hardware, network paths, and several services. When it fails, operators need to find both the user-visible symptom and the component behavior that explains it.

Across regions and hosts, failures and slowdowns can appear in different places at different times. Track latency, resource saturation, and component health with enough context to connect related observations.