System Design

Observability

8 practice questions. Free questions open a full answer guide; the rest unlock with Pro.

  • An intermittent latency problem only shows up in production under load, spans several services, and you can't reproduce it. How would you use your observability tooling to find the root cause, and what does this incident tell you about gaps in that tooling? Staff-principal level
  • Design an online experimentation (A/B testing) platform that lets data science teams safely roll out new ML models and measure their real impact on business metrics.Go Pro Senior level
  • Design an observability platform for 80 microservices with mixed languages (Go, Python, Node.js). The platform must surface SLO burn rates in real-time and automatically create incident tickets when error budget is consumed faster than expected.Go Pro Senior level
  • You're standing up observability for a fleet of microservices from scratch. Walk me through how you'd use metrics, logs, and traces together, and how you'd keep the telemetry cost from exploding as the system grows.Go Pro Staff-principal level
  • Your team's alerts are so noisy that on-call has started ignoring them, and a real outage slipped through. How would you redesign the alerting so it catches real problems without crying wolf?Go Pro Mid level
  • Design a metrics ingestion and storage system that collects time-series telemetry (CPU, latency, custom counters) from hundreds of thousands of hosts and serves dashboard and alerting queries.Go Pro Senior level
  • How would you design a model monitoring system for 30 production ML models with varying update frequencies and business criticality?Go Pro Senior level
  • You're standing up a brand-new service that will run in production. What would you instrument from day one so that when it breaks at 3am, someone can actually figure out why?Go Pro Mid level
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