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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
Design a multi-tenant metrics platform that enforces per-tenant quotas, strong isolation, and cost-based billing. Describe ingestion isolation, storage partitioning (namespaces/partitions), authentication/authorization, query routing, and the trade-offs between a single shared cluster versus per-tenant clusters.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Implement a streaming downsampler in Python that consumes time-series datapoints in the form (timestamp: int seconds, value: float) and outputs per-minute averages aligned to minute boundaries. The implementation should tolerate out-of-order points up to 10 seconds late, and use O(1) memory per active minute window.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Describe common time-series storage and compression techniques used by TSDBs (for example delta-of-delta timestamp encoding, Gorilla float XOR, run-length encoding), and explain how and when to downsample data (averages, histograms, sketches). Discuss trade-offs between storage size and query accuracy for dashboards vs analytics.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Analyze trade-offs between pre-aggregation (rollups), on-the-fly aggregation, and query-time stitching for dashboards and ad-hoc analytics. For each method discuss impact on storage, query latency, cardinality, accuracy (especially percentiles), and operational complexity. When is a hybrid approach preferable?
HardSystem Design
0 practiced
Design architecture for multi-tenant RBAC and data isolation in an observability backend that must allow an admin to run aggregated billing queries across tenants but prevent raw cross-tenant data access. Discuss encryption strategies, per-tenant keys, a query proxy approach, audit logging, and performance trade-offs.

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