PCA Practice Questions 2 — 50 Questions

Question 1

When configuring a dashboard panel, what is the significance of the 'Legend' field?

Accepted Answer

To rename the metric for display purposes. The legend field allows you to customize the labels displayed in the graph tooltip and legend section.

Answer

To set the alert threshold

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To enable auto-refresh

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To filter which metrics are shown

Question 2

A team wants to visualize metrics from Prometheus in Grafana. What is the standard way to connect these two services?

Accepted Answer

Add a 'Prometheus' data source in Grafana. Grafana allows users to add Prometheus as a 'Data Source' by providing the URL of the Prometheus server.

Answer

Upload a JSON file to Prometheus

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Configure a Prometheus scrape job for Grafana

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Install the 'Grafana-exporter' in Prometheus

Question 3

Your Prometheus server is hitting high memory usage due to high cardinality. Which action is most effective at reducing memory pressure?

Accepted Answer

Drop high-cardinality labels using relabel_configs. Reducing label cardinality (e.g., removing unique user IDs) is the primary way to reduce TSDB index size and memory usage.

Answer

Increase scrape_interval

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Use more exporters

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Enable remote write

Question 4

You are seeing 'Too many active series' in your Prometheus logs. Which action should be your first priority to address this?

Accepted Answer

Analyze the number of active series per label name.. Identifying which labels are causing the high cardinality is the standard first step to prevent OOM (Out Of Memory) crashes.

Answer

Switch to a different monitoring tool.

Answer

Disable all alerting rules.

Answer

Increase Prometheus memory limits.

Question 5

What is the primary role of the 'Alertmanager'?

Accepted Answer

To manage and route alerts generated by Prometheus.. Alertmanager is responsible for grouping, silencing, and routing alerts to external systems like PagerDuty or email.

Answer

To store long-term metric data.

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To scrape metrics from targets.

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To visualize metrics in dashboards.

Question 6

When evaluating the 'Traffic' golden signal, what is the best metric to watch for a web service?

Accepted Answer

Requests per second.. Request rate (requests per second) is the standard way to measure traffic volume.

Answer

CPU usage percentage.

Answer

HTTP error count.

Answer

Response latency.

Question 7

What does the 'firing' state mean for an alert?

Accepted Answer

The alert condition is currently true. An alert enters the 'firing' state when its condition expression evaluates to true for the specified 'for' duration.

Answer

The alert is being silenced

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The alert is pending

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The alert has been resolved

Question 8

Which THREE features are provided by Grafana when used with Prometheus?

Accepted Answer

Customizable dashboard visualization.. Visualization, dashboard templating, and alert integration are core Grafana features.

Answer

Long-term storage of metrics.

Answer

Automatic code deployment.

Question 9

What is the purpose of a 'grouping' configuration in the Alertmanager 'route' block?

Accepted Answer

To aggregate similar alerts into a single notification. Grouping categorizes multiple alerts into a single notification based on common label sets, reducing alert fatigue.

Answer

To inhibit alerts based on severity

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To ensure alerts are processed in alphabetical order

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To create hierarchical alert routing

Question 10

Which THREE factors contribute to a 'high cardinality' problem in a Prometheus environment?

Accepted Answer

Adding high-variance values like email addresses to labels.. High cardinality is caused by labels with many unique values, like timestamps, user IDs, or un-normalized request paths.

Answer

Using a low scrape interval.

Answer

Using too many scrape targets.

Question 11

Which TWO of the following should be considered when defining metric names?

Accepted Answer

Use descriptive, clear names. Names should be descriptive and use the unit suffix as per conventions.

Answer

Avoid using underscores

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Use random IDs to ensure uniqueness

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Include the instance name in the metric

Question 12

Which THREE of the following are valid metric types supported natively by Prometheus client libraries?

Accepted Answer

Histogram. The four core metric types in Prometheus are Counter, Gauge, Histogram, and Summary.

Answer

Snapshot

Answer

Set

Question 13

You want to notify different teams based on the 'service' label of an alert. Where should you configure this logic?

Accepted Answer

In the Alertmanager configuration. The Alertmanager configuration file contains the routing tree that maps alerts to receivers based on labels.

Answer

In the node exporter config

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In the Grafana data source

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In the Prometheus alerting rule

Question 14

You have a recording rule that references a metric that doesn't exist. What is the impact?

Accepted Answer

The rule evaluation results in no data. The recording rule will be evaluated, but because the expression returns no data, no new time series will be created for that rule.

Answer

Prometheus logs a critical error

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The entire server crashes

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The rule is automatically disabled

Question 15

Your application has a short-lived batch job that finishes before the Prometheus server can scrape it. What architectural component should be used?

Accepted Answer

Pushgateway. The Pushgateway is designed to allow ephemeral and batch jobs to expose their metrics to Prometheus.

Answer

Prometheus API

Answer

Alertmanager

Answer

node_exporter

Question 16

Which THREE of these are common Prometheus data sources?

Accepted Answer

Static configuration files.. Kubernetes service discovery, static file configs, and Consul are standard discovery methods.

Answer

User manual entry in the UI.

Answer

Direct SQL database connections.

Question 17

Which of these is NOT a valid Alertmanager receiver type?

Accepted Answer

SQL. While Alertmanager supports many integrations (Webhook, Email, PagerDuty), 'SQL' is not a native built-in receiver type.

Answer

Webhook

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Email

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PagerDuty

Question 18

Which TWO of the following are valid fields in a Prometheus alerting rule definition?

Accepted Answer

expr. A rule must have an 'alert' name and an 'expr' query.

Answer

timeout

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retries

Answer

target

Question 19

What is the primary function of the 'blackbox_exporter' in a monitoring architecture?

Accepted Answer

Endpoint probing. It allows monitoring of endpoints from the outside (blackbox perspective) rather than the inside (whitebox instrumentation).

Answer

Database performance

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Log aggregation

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Hardware monitoring

Question 20

Which tool would you use to monitor the availability of a website from various geographic locations?

Accepted Answer

blackbox_exporter. The blackbox_exporter is the standard tool for probing the availability of HTTP, TCP, or DNS services.

Answer

node_exporter

Answer

Pushgateway

Answer

Prometheus API