A topology-based monitoring and alerting system is disclosed. Streams of metric time series values emitted by computing nodes in a distributed computing system that are relevant to the queries are aggregated in query caches in a historically accurate manner. Submissions of the queries for progressing time periods are answered from the query caches with historically accurate query results. Because streamed metric time series values are pre-aggregated in the query caches prior to a submission of a query for a time period, the submission can be answered with computational efficiently from the query cache established for the query while providing a historically accurate query result.