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Design a Prometheus-Style Metrics System

HardSystem Design00:00
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Your question is Design a Prometheus-Style Metrics System. Take a moment with it on the right.

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Problem

Design a counter/metrics system like Prometheus/Datadog counters: clients (mobile and web) send many kinds of events through an SDK to the backend; mobile clients may send large batches after being offline; no event may be lost; aggregate events for dashboards with a data-freshness requirement of tens of minutes.

Asked in the system design (60 min) stage. Candidate described the prompt in Chinese; translated.

  1. Clarify delivery, ordering, deduplication, retention, and dashboard requirements.
  2. Estimate ingestion, storage, and aggregation capacity using explicit assumptions.
  3. Design client, backend, durable storage, stream processing, and query paths.
  4. Explain retries, offline batching, backpressure, replay, and disaster recovery.
  5. Describe monitoring, correctness validation, and optional anomaly detection.

Constraints include no silent event loss, delayed mobile batches, tens-of-minutes freshness, bounded operating cost, and safe handling of duplicate or malformed events.