Design a large-scale Monitoring Platform
Last updated: February 5, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a real-time monitoring system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Booking.com
February 5, 2026153
14
4,428 solved
Design a real-time monitoring system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Onsite at Booking.com. 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. Booking.com 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 happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
Practice a Similar Problem on Codemia
Solve a related problem with our interactive workspace, get AI feedback, and view detailed solutions.
Solve on CodemiaSample Answer
Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Real-time monitoring of system health and performance metrics (CPU, memory, disk usage, request latency).
- Ability to handle millions of incoming requests per sec...
Capacity Estimation
- Assuming Booking.com processes about 1 billion requests daily, this translates to approximately 11,574 requests per second (QPS).
- If we estimate that each monitoring event generates 1 KB of data: ...
Submit Your Answer
