Dataford
Interview QuestionsInterview GuidesExperiencesMock InterviewsPricing
Get started

Top 5xx IPs from Logs

MediumPython00:00
Practice interviewer
In session
5 left
00:00

Your question is Top 5xx IPs from Logs. Start with the requirements on the right.

Run and submit as often as you like. When you're ready, talk me through your approach or go straight to the code.

You need to log in / sign up to run or submit.

Problem

In a Databricks observability workflow, you need to process a massive web server log and identify which client IP addresses generated the most server-side failures. Write a function that scans log lines and returns the top k IP addresses by number of HTTP 5xx responses.

Formal Specification

Implement a function that takes:

  • log_lines: a list of strings, where each string is one log entry
  • k: an integer

Each valid log line follows this simplified format: "<ip> - - [timestamp] \"METHOD PATH HTTP/1.1\" status bytes"

A line should count toward an IP only if:

  1. the line contains at least 9 whitespace-separated tokens, and
  2. the HTTP status code is an integer in the range 500 to 599

Return a list of [ip, count] pairs sorted by:

  1. descending error count
  2. ascending IP string for ties

Ignore malformed lines and lines with non-integer status codes.

Constraints

  • 1 <= len(log_lines) <= 10^5
  • 1 <= len(log_lines[i]) <= 300
  • 1 <= k <= 10^4
  • Each valid line uses the simplified whitespace-separated log format
  • Malformed lines and non-integer status codes must be ignored

Function Signature

def top_5xx_ips(log_lines, k):
Your solutionPython 3
You need to log in / sign up to run or submit.
Run your code to see test output