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Design a Metrics Monitoring and Alerting System is a hard system design interview question covering Distributed Systems, Databases, observability, time series — the kind asked at FAANG (Facebook/Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) and AI-first companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Nvidia.
Design a system that ingests 10 million metric samples per second from 100,000 hosts (about 100 million active time series), serves dashboards, and fires alerts within one minute of a threshold breach. Data must be queryable for 2 years with tiered resolution.
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