System designMediumsd-g163

Subject DashboardingLevel Mid–Senior~35 minCommon in Databases & SQL · Concurrency · Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design the query/serving backend for an observability dashboarding product. A popular incident dashboard has 40 panels, each running a metrics query, and during an outage 500 engineers all load it at once, hammering the metrics backend with 20,000 near-identical queries in seconds. Dashboards auto-refresh every 30s. The metrics backend is the bottleneck and starts to brown out. Design the serving layer so dashboards stay fast and the backend survives the thundering herd.

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.

Learn the concepts

Narrate your design

Loading whiteboard…

Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.