Advertisement
Interview Question
Alerts based on log ingestion are delayed by 15 minutes. Walk through diagnosing and fixing pipeline slowness.
Key Points to Cover
- Check ingestion lag via Kafka/Fluentd/ELK metrics
- Identify slow parsing/transform stages
- Scale collectors or add parallel pipelines
- Tune buffer/flush intervals and batching
- Add alerts on pipeline lag itself
Evaluation Rubric
Measures ingestion lag accurately30% weight
Identifies bottleneck stages30% weight
Suggests scaling/tuning fixes20% weight
Adds monitoring for lag itself20% weight
Hints
- 💡ELK indexers often bottleneck under load.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
- ⚠️Assuming the bottleneck is always at the end of the pipeline without checking upstream components.
- ⚠️Not having granular metrics for each stage of the logging pipeline.
- ⚠️Overlooking network latency between pipeline components.
- ⚠️Focusing solely on log volume without considering the complexity of parsing/transformations.
- ⚠️Neglecting the performance of the alerting system itself.
Potential Follow-up Questions
- ❓How to design log pipelines for elasticity?
- ❓What about sampling?
Advertisement
Related Questions
Questions that share similar topics with this one
Log Aggregation Tools
Beginner📞 Phone Screen•2 min•Phone
Log Ingestion Failure
Intermediate🔧 Troubleshooting Scenarios•10 min•Scenario
Distributed Tracing Basics
Intermediate📞 Phone Screen•2 min•Phone
Metrics vs Logs vs Traces in Observability
Advanced🔬 Technical Deep Dive•5 min•Technical
Design a Monitoring System
Advanced🏗️ System Design•45 min•System-Design