Design Monitoring Infrastructure for microservices
Last updated: October 28, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a real-time monitoring system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
SentinelOne
System Design
Machine Learning Engineer
SentinelOne
October 28, 2025Machine Learning Engineer
System Design Round
System Design
Medium
34
10
3,666 solved
Design a real-time monitoring system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at SentinelOne 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
Security and authentication
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
Requirements gathering and capacity estimation
Partitioning and sharding strategies
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 schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Real-time monitoring of microservices with metrics like request count, latency, error rates, etc.
- Alerts and notifications based on threshold breaches (e.g., err...
Capacity Estimation
- Estimating QPS:
- Assume 10,000 microservices, each generating 100 metrics per second.
- Each metric generates 1 request for monitoring.
- Total QPS = 10,000 microservices * 100 metrics = ...
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