PCA Timed Practice Test 2 — 10 Questions

Question 1

Which THREE of the following are valid components within a Prometheus Alerting Rule file?

Accepted Answer

expr. Prometheus alerting rules contain a 'groups' array, which contains individual 'rules' (alerts or recordings), and each alert rule must have an 'alert' name and 'expr'.

Answer

receiver

Answer

routing_tree

Question 2

What is the purpose of the 'labels' field in an alerting rule?

Accepted Answer

To add metadata for routing and filtering. Labels allow you to attach metadata to the alert, which can then be used in Alertmanager for routing and grouping.

Answer

To define the alert message body

Answer

To select the target server

Answer

To set the alert severity level

Question 3

A legacy batch job runs once per day and finishes in seconds. Why is a standard Prometheus pull model inadequate here?

Accepted Answer

The job is too fast for HTTP polling.. Prometheus pull intervals are typically set to seconds or minutes; a job that finishes quickly might never be 'up' when Prometheus scrapes it.

Answer

The data is too large for memory.

Answer

Pull model is insecure.

Answer

Prometheus cannot scrape batch jobs.

Question 4

Which monitoring philosophy is core to the Prometheus architecture?

Accepted Answer

Centralized pull-based scraping.. Prometheus favors the pull model, where the server controls the scrape rate and frequency, providing better control over the load on the monitoring system.

Answer

Agent-less log aggregation.

Answer

Push-based data ingestion.

Answer

Event-driven architecture.

Question 5

You are seeing 'NaN' values in your gauge metrics. What does this indicate?

Accepted Answer

An undefined gauge state. NaN (Not a Number) is a valid value for gauges in Prometheus, often indicating that a value is currently undefined or not applicable.

Answer

A scrape error

Answer

Metric type mismatch

Answer

Label collision

Question 6

What happens to your alerts if the Alertmanager configuration file contains a syntax error?

Accepted Answer

Alertmanager continues using the previous configuration. If the configuration is invalid, Alertmanager will fail to reload, and it will continue using the last known good configuration.

Answer

Prometheus stops scraping

Answer

Alertmanager crashes immediately

Answer

All alerts are dropped

Question 7

Why would you choose to create a recording rule for a complex PromQL query?

Accepted Answer

To reduce dashboard query latency. Recording rules pre-calculate complex queries, making dashboards load faster by querying the pre-computed series instead of re-calculating the entire expression.

Answer

To increase metric resolution

Answer

To bypass authentication

Answer

To enable cross-server alerting

Question 8

Which TWO of the following are valid components of an Alertmanager configuration file?

Accepted Answer

receivers. A standard Alertmanager config file requires 'route' (the routing tree) and 'receivers' (the notification targets).

Answer

storage_path

Answer

global_variables

Answer

scrape_configs

Question 9

You need to expose metrics from a legacy application that only logs to a file. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Use the node_exporter textfile collector. The node_exporter textfile collector is designed to read metrics from a specific directory where you can drop files containing Prometheus-formatted data.

Answer

None of the above

Answer

Use a blackbox exporter

Answer

Use Pushgateway

Answer

Use a custom exporter

Question 10

When configuring a custom exporter, how do you provide labels to a metric?

Accepted Answer

By passing a label dictionary. Labels are passed as a dictionary or map when creating the metric object in the client library.

Answer

In the scrape config

Answer

Through a config file

Answer

Via environment variables