Design a Analytics for Notion
Last updated: October 23, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Notion
October 23, 202529
15
2,296 solved
Design a low-latency analytics system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Technical Screen at Notion. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Notion values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Event Tracking: Capture user interactions with Notion (e.g., page views, edits, comments).
- Real-time Analytics: Provide dashboards for users to visualize thei...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity:
- Daily Active Users: Assume 1 million DAUs with an average of 10 interactions per user per day.
- Total Requests: 1 million users * 10 interactions = 10 million requests...
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