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Observability and Monitoring Architecture Questions

Designing and architecting end to end observability and monitoring systems that scale, remain reliable under load, and do not become single points of failure. Topics include deciding which telemetry to collect and why including metrics logs traces and events, instrumentation strategies, collection models such as push versus pull, high throughput telemetry ingestion and pipeline design, time series storage and compression, aggregation and partitioning strategies, metric cardinality and retention tradeoffs, distributed tracing propagation and sampling strategies, log aggregation and secure storage, selection of storage backends and time series databases, storage tiering and cost optimization, query and dashboard performance considerations, access control and multi tenancy, integration with deployment pipelines and tooling, and design patterns for self healing telemetry pipelines. Senior level assessments include designing scalable ingestion and aggregation architectures, storage tiering and query performance optimization, cost and operational tradeoffs, and organizational impacts of observability data.

MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Explain an architecture for multi-region telemetry ingestion that supports low-latency local queries and global long-term analytics while respecting data residency constraints. Discuss replication, federation, query routing, and how to avoid excessive duplication and egress costs.
MediumSystem Design
0 practiced
Describe a self-healing telemetry ingestion pipeline. Explain how the system detects failed collectors or processors, reroutes telemetry to healthy instances, replays buffered data, auto-scales components, and provides observability on the observability pipeline itself so platform engineers can detect and remediate issues quickly.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
You need to maintain accurate 99th percentile request latency across 10k metric streams in near real-time with limited memory. Propose an aggregation approach using sketches (t-digest, HDR histograms, etc.), outline how to merge partial aggregates from collectors, and discuss precision versus storage trade-offs and the impact on alerting.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Collectors in your telemetry pipeline are exhibiting a memory leak that causes restarts and dropped telemetry. Design monitoring and remediation: specify collector probe metrics to collect, automatic restart and backoff policies, safe heap/trace capture strategies, and deploy-time mitigations such as gradual rollouts, memory limits, and canaries.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Discuss trade-offs in metric retention policies. Given a budget and a diverse set of metrics (critical SLIs, service metrics, debug metrics), propose a retention tiering plan with different resolutions per tier, explain how to implement rollups, and show how retention affects alerting and forensic analysis.

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