Log Parsing for Outage Patterns | Dataford Interview Questions

Write a script or function to parse a log file and identify patterns indicating a service outage.

Implement identify_outages(log_lines, threshold). Each line has the format timestamp|level|message. A line indicates an outage condition when its level is ERROR or CRITICAL. Return consecutive outage intervals containing at least threshold qualifying lines. Each result must contain the first timestamp, last timestamp, and number of qualifying lines. Ignore unrelated lines and malformed lines.

Input and Output

log_lines is a list of strings, and threshold is a positive integer. Return a list of dictionaries with keys start, end, and count, in chronological input order.

Constraints

1 <= len(log_lines) <= 1000
1 <= threshold <= len(log_lines)
Each valid line has the format timestamp|level|message
A timestamp and message contain no pipe character
Only ERROR and CRITICAL levels indicate outage conditions
Malformed lines must be ignored and terminate the current run

Function Signature

def identify_outages(log_lines, threshold):

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