Design a Logging Service
Last updated: March 18, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a low-latency logging system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
JPMorgan
March 18, 202642
10
3,024 solved
Design a low-latency logging 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 JPMorgan. 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. JPMorgan values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Clearly define functional and non-functional requirements
- Propose a reasonable high-level architecture with core components
- Choose appropriate data storage solutions with basic justification
- Discuss basic scaling strategies (horizontal scaling, caching)
- Identify potential bottlenecks and suggest simple solutions
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
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Log Ingestion: The system must accept log entries from various services with a minimal latency of less than 100ms per request.
- Log Querying: Users should be a...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming JPMorgan handles approximately 10 million transactions per day across its services:
- If each transaction generates an average of 5 log entries, that results in **50 million log entries per d...
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