Code RoomAutomated anomaly detection
HardPrep Room Coding #3283

Automated anomaly detection

System designDistributed systemsSenior–Staff~45 min

Design an automated anomaly-detection service that watches ~500,000 production metrics in near-real-time and raises alerts without engineers hand-tuning static thresholds. Metrics have strong daily and weekly seasonality (traffic is 5x higher at noon and on weekdays). The system must detect a real regression within ~2 minutes, keep false-positive rate low enough that on-call trusts it, and scale to evaluate all series on a rolling basis. Design the modeling, the streaming evaluation, and how you control false positives.

What a strong answer looks like

Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts (data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes) and name the trade-offs you are making.

Clarify5:00 left
Estimate5:00 planned
Design15:00 planned
Deep dive12:00 planned
Failure8:00 planned
0:00
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.