Chapter 3 — Log Aggregation System
Chapter of Observability Pipeline & Data Infrastructure, part of System Design.
Purpose
Structured vs. unstructured, schema-on-read vs. schema-on-write, deduplication — written up as a conceptual chapter in the observability book rather than duplicated here; see Log Aggregation for the schema-on-write vs. schema-on-read trade-off and the two unrelated deduplication problems.
[stub: log-aggregation-system]— 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
Related notes
Chapter 4 — Distributed Tracing Backend
Trace assembly from spans, tail-based vs. head-based sampling.
Chapter 2 — Metrics Storage (TSDB)
Write amplification, chunk encoding, compaction, cardinality explosion.
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.