System design interview question
"Design a metrics and alerting system. Services emit time-series metrics — request rates, latencies, error counts, resource usage. Engineers build dashboards and define alerts. Ten million active time series, and alerts must fire within a minute of a problem starting."
time-series storage and evaluation at scale, plus the alerting semantics that separate a useful system from a pager that everyone ignores. The distinguishing technical content is: why time-series data compresses extraordinarily well, why high-cardinality labels are the failure mode, and how alert evaluation is scheduled.
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