Design a scalable Monitoring System
Last updated: July 13, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a scalable monitoring system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Figma
System Design
Software Engineer
Figma
July 13, 2025Software Engineer
Technical Screen
System Design
Medium
173
11
4,730 solved
Design a scalable monitoring system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Figma asks this during the Technical Screen to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
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
Monitoring, logging, and alerting
Database selection and data modeling
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
Security and authentication
Message queues and async processing
Consistency models and replication
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 monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- What would the deployment pipeline look like for this system?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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:
- Collect monitoring data from various services and components at Figma.
- Provide real-time analytics and dashboards for users to visualize performance metrics. -...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate the capacity needs:
- QPS Estimation: Assume Figma has 1 million active users, each generating an average of 10 monitoring requests per minute.
- Total QPS = (1,000,000 users * 10 r...
Submit Your Answer
Markdown supported