Chapter 2 — Metrics Storage (TSDB)
Chapter of Observability Pipeline & Data Infrastructure, part of System Design.
Purpose
Write amplification, chunk encoding, compaction, cardinality explosion — written up as a conceptual chapter in the observability book rather than duplicated here; see Metrics Storage (TSDB) for the head block/WAL/compaction model and why a cardinality spike is a storage-engine incident.
[stub: metrics-storage-tsdb]— this chapter is still a placeholder for the system-design-specific treatment (capacity numbers, failure-mode walkthroughs, worked practice questions). Greppable doc-debt marker.
Metadata
| Dimension | Detail |
|---|---|
| Author | Amit Singh |
| Scope | MAANG interview preparation — not production documentation |
Local graph
Linked from 2 notes
Chapter 3 — Monitoring at Scale
Prometheus, Mimir, Cortex, and Thanos as the horizontally-scaled answer to a single Prometheus instance running out of room.
System Design
Principal/Staff-level system design reference collection for MAANG interview preparation — observability pipelines, distributed systems, reliability engineering, and beyond.
Related notes
Chapter 4 — Distributed Tracing Backend
Trace assembly from spans, tail-based vs. head-based sampling.
Chapter 3 — Log Aggregation System
Structured vs. unstructured, schema-on-read vs. schema-on-write, deduplication.
Chapter 6 — Multi-tenant Observability Platform
Tenant isolation, quota enforcement, cost attribution.
Chapter 5 — OpenTelemetry Collector Pipeline
Multi-pipeline routing, processor chaining, exporter fan-out.