Metrics Sense: Designing a Metric II

Question

You are the TPM for a service that has multiple customer clients who send many (often large) requests to your service’s API and it receives a response. You want to set a latency SLAService Level Agreement for your clients. How would you go about setting this SLA and instrumenting your service to measure this?

Background

This question is both a metric and technical question combined into one, making it excellent for practicing both skills needed for a TPM interview. Setting SLAs for platforms with many different clients is also a common requirement, and it’s critical for TPMs to at least be familiar with them since it’s important in managing cross-team and external relationships and expectations.

Solution approach

This is a two-part question; we need to define the SLA (the metrics portion) and then discuss an implementation option.

• For the metrics portion, we’ll start by listing several options and the pros and cons of each option. Then, we’ll provide a recommendation of which option we should go with and why.
• For the implementation portion, we’ll discuss a way to capture the necessary events

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