How many Prometheus Fundamentals practice questions does Courseiva have?

Courseiva has 44 Prometheus Fundamentals practice questions for the PCA exam.

What is the best way to practise Prometheus Fundamentals questions?

Start with a short focused session to identify gaps, then work through explanations. Repeat with a longer session once the weak areas feel solid.

Can I practise only Prometheus Fundamentals questions?

Yes — the session launcher on this page filters questions to this domain only. Choose any session length for inline explanations and scoring.

PCA · domain

Prometheus Fundamentals

Prometheus Fundamentals covers the core data model, metric types, scrape-based collection, and PromQL basics that every PCA candidate must know. Questions test retention defaults, the Pushgateway's role, the synthetic 'up' metric, and rate() semantics. Expect direct recall plus scenario items distinguishing counters, gauges, histograms, and summaries in real configurations.

44 questions10 easy20 medium14 hard

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What this domain covers

What to know about Prometheus Fundamentals

Be able to state Prometheus's default retention, explain Pushgateway's batch-job purpose and stale-metric caveat, read the 'up' metric for scrape health, and apply rate() to counters over a range vector. The single most important thing: rate() requires a counter and a range selector, returning per-second values.

Default Prometheus TSDB retention period and how --storage.tsdb.retention.time overrides it

Pushgateway behavior: batch job metrics, no automatic deletion, and its limitations for service monitoring

The 'up' metric: synthetic per-target scrape health indicator, value 1 or 0

PromQL rate() and irate() converting counters to per-second rates over a range vector

Watch out for

Common Prometheus Fundamentals exam traps

▸Assuming Pushgateway is a general metrics proxy; it is only for short-lived batch jobs and never deletes pushed series automatically
▸Confusing rate() with increase() or applying rate() to gauges instead of counters
▸Believing 'up' reflects application health rather than whether the scrape itself succeeded

Question index

All Prometheus Fundamentals questions (44)

Click any question to see the full explanation, or start a practice session above.

You are deploying Prometheus in a Kubernetes cluster and need to ensure it discovers pods labeled 'app=frontend'. Which configuration block is required?

Easy 2

Which label is used to group alerts in Alertmanager?

Medium 3

Which THREE conditions cause a scrape to be unsuccessful?

Hard 4

Which THREE features are provided by the Prometheus HTTP API?

Hard 5

Which TWO of the following are valid ways to configure target discovery in Prometheus?

Medium 6

Which component is best suited for long-term storage?

Easy 7

Which THREE of the following metrics are automatically added to all scraped targets?

Hard 8

Which mechanism allows Prometheus to discover targets by reading a list from a file?

Medium 9

What is the purpose of the 'rule_files' configuration?

Medium 10

What is the primary language used to query Prometheus data?

Easy 11

What is the default port that Prometheus listens on?

Easy 12

Which component is responsible for receiving alerts from Prometheus and managing notification delivery?

Easy 13

When a Prometheus server is restarted, how does it recover the in-memory data?

Hard 14

What is the benefit of using recording rules?

Medium 15

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

Hard 16

What is the purpose of 'tombstones' in the TSDB?

Hard 17

Which THREE of the following are common sources of high cardinality?

Hard 18

What is the default value for the scrape interval?

Easy 19

Which TWO of the following are core responsibilities of the Prometheus server?

Medium 20

Where do you define the scrape interval for a specific target?

Easy 21

Which TSDB component is responsible for ensuring data durability if the server crashes?

Medium 22

Which operator performs a set union in PromQL?

Medium 23

What happens if a label set for a metric changes during its lifetime?

Hard 24

You are performing a 'label_replace' operation. What is the correct syntax for a regex capture group?

Hard 25

In the Prometheus data model, what is a 'sample'?

Medium 26

What is the default retention period for Prometheus data?

Easy 27

Which TWO of the following are true about the Pushgateway?

Medium 28

When using the 'scrape_timeout', what happens if the timeout is reached?

Medium 29

Which function is used to convert a counter rate into a per-second rate over a time range?

Medium 30

Which THREE of the following are required to expose a new metric in an application?

Hard 31

A batch job runs for only 30 seconds every hour. How should you expose these metrics to Prometheus?

Medium 32

Which component allows Prometheus to be scaled horizontally for high availability?

Medium 33

Which TWO of the following are valid data types in Prometheus?

Medium 34

Which TWO of the following can be configured globally?

Medium 35

When configuring Alertmanager to send notifications to Slack, which block defines the routing tree?

Medium 36

Which file format does Prometheus use for its main configuration?

Easy 37

Which metric type is best for reporting the number of requests received by a service?

Medium 38

Which THREE labels are often considered part of the default Prometheus ecosystem metrics?

Hard 39

Which THREE of the following are components of a Prometheus alert state?

Hard 40

Which THREE of the following are valid Prometheus TSDB file types?

Hard 41

What is the purpose of the 'up' metric?

Easy 42

Which TWO of the following are valid Alertmanager configuration blocks?

Medium 43

What is the behavior of the 'absent()' function?

Hard 44

Which TWO of the following are valid ways to run Prometheus?

Medium

Other domains

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Frequently asked questions

What does the Prometheus Fundamentals domain cover on the PCA exam?: Be able to state Prometheus's default retention, explain Pushgateway's batch-job purpose and stale-metric caveat, read the 'up' metric for scrape health, and apply rate() to counters over a range vector. The single most important thing: rate() requires a counter and a range selector, returning per-second values.
How many questions are in this domain?: This page lists all 44 Prometheus Fundamentals questions in the PCA question bank. The actual exam draws from this domain proportionally to its weighting in the official exam blueprint.
What is the best way to practise this domain?: Start with a short focused session (10 questions) to identify gaps, then work through explanations. Repeat with a longer session once the weak areas feel solid.
Can I practise only Prometheus Fundamentals questions?: Yes — the session launcher on this page filters questions to this domain only. Choose any session length for inline explanations and scoring.

Study guide

Read about Prometheus Fundamentals

The PCA study guide for this domain covers everything tested on the real exam.

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Promql practice questions Prometheus Fundamentals practice questions Observability Concepts practice questions Alerting And Dashboarding practice questions Instrumentation And Exporters practice questions PCA fundamentals practice questions PCA scenario practice questions PCA troubleshooting practice questions

Common exam traps

•Assuming Pushgateway is a general metrics proxy; it is only for short-lived batch jobs and never deletes pushed series automatically
•Confusing rate() with increase() or applying rate() to gauges instead of counters
•Believing 'up' reflects application health rather than whether the scrape itself succeeded

Where to go next

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