Design Monitoring Infrastructure for microservices
Last updated: December 8, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed monitoring system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Oracle
System Design
Software Engineer
Oracle
December 8, 2025Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Medium
5
5
4,669 solved
Design a distributed monitoring system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Oracle asks this during the Onsite 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
Consistency models and replication
Database selection and data modeling
Load balancing and horizontal scaling
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
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 would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Real-time Monitoring: The system should collect and display metrics from various microservices in real-time.
- Alerting Mechanism: Users should receive alerts ...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity, assume:
- Number of Microservices: 100 microservices generating metrics.
- Metrics per Microservice: Each service emits 10 metrics every second.
- Total Metrics: 100 ...
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