PCA Practice Test 6 — 10 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

Answer

To enable auto-refresh

Answer

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

Answer

Configure a Prometheus scrape job for Grafana

Answer

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

Answer

Use more exporters

Answer

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.

Answer

To scrape metrics from targets.

Answer

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

Answer

The alert is pending

Answer

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

Answer

To ensure alerts are processed in alphabetical order

Answer

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.