Design a Monitoring Service
Last updated: January 5, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven monitoring system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Workday
January 5, 2026413
6
469 solved
Design a event-driven monitoring system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Workday typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
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 region-wide outage?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Event Processing: The system must handle millions of events per second (EPS) from various sources (e.g., application logs, user activities, system metrics).
- **Rea...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming an average event size of 1KB:
- Requests per Second (QPS): Let's estimate processing 5 million events per minute, which translates to approximately 83,333 EPS.
- Storage Calculation: ...
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