KCNA Monitoring and Logging 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is the purpose of a Prometheus AlertManager?
- Scrape metrics from targets
- Store long-term metrics data
- Route and deduplicate alerts from Prometheus (Correct answer)
- Visualize metrics dashboards
Correct answer: Route and deduplicate alerts from Prometheus
AlertManager handles alerts sent by Prometheus, deduplicating, grouping, and routing them to receivers like email, Slack, or PagerDuty.
Question 2: Which Fluent Bit component is responsible for parsing and transforming log records before they are sent to an output?
- Input plugin
- Filter plugin (Correct answer)
- Output plugin
- Router plugin
Correct answer: Filter plugin
Filter plugins in Fluent Bit process and transform log records between input collection and output delivery, enabling parsing, enrichment, and modification.
Question 3: What Kubernetes resource type is most commonly used to deploy a log collector (like Fluent Bit) on every node in a cluster?
- Deployment
- StatefulSet
- DaemonSet (Correct answer)
- ReplicaSet
Correct answer: DaemonSet
A DaemonSet ensures that one pod runs on every (or selected) node, making it ideal for node-level log collection agents.
Question 4: In OpenTelemetry, what is a 'span'?
- A metric data point
- A single unit of work or operation within a distributed trace (Correct answer)
- A log entry with structured fields
- A collection of resource attributes
Correct answer: A single unit of work or operation within a distributed trace
A span represents a single named, timed operation within a trace, capturing start time, duration, and contextual attributes of that unit of work.
Question 5: Which Prometheus metric type is best suited for measuring request latency distribution with configurable quantiles calculated server-side?
- Counter
- Gauge
- Summary (Correct answer)
- Histogram
Correct answer: Summary
Summary metrics calculate configurable quantiles (e.g., p50, p95, p99) on the client side and are useful for pre-aggregated latency distributions.
Question 6: What is the role of a 'scrape interval' in Prometheus?
- How often AlertManager fires alerts
- How often Prometheus queries targets for metrics (Correct answer)
- How long metrics are retained in storage
- How often dashboards refresh in Grafana
Correct answer: How often Prometheus queries targets for metrics
The scrape interval defines how frequently Prometheus pulls (scrapes) metrics from each configured target endpoint.
Question 7: Which component in the Elastic Stack (ELK) is responsible for receiving, transforming, and routing log data?
- Elasticsearch
- Kibana
- Logstash (Correct answer)
- Beats
Correct answer: Logstash
Logstash ingests data from multiple sources, transforms it using filter plugins, and routes the output to destinations like Elasticsearch.
KCNA Monitoring and Logging 3
What is the purpose of a Prometheus AlertManager?