PCA PCA Exporters & Instrumentation

Question 1

What is the role of a Prometheus exporter?

Accepted Answer

It translates metrics from a third-party system into the Prometheus exposition format and exposes them on an HTTP endpoint

Answer

It exports Prometheus TSDB blocks to an external backup system

Answer

It forwards Prometheus alerts to external notification channels

Answer

It converts Prometheus metrics to Grafana JSON format

Question 2

Which exporter is the standard choice for exposing Linux/Unix OS-level metrics like CPU, memory, and disk to Prometheus?

Accepted Answer

node_exporter

Answer

process_exporter

Answer

cadvisor

Answer

blackbox_exporter

Question 3

What Prometheus metric type should you use to track a value that can both increase and decrease, such as the number of active connections?

Accepted Answer

Gauge

Answer

Counter

Answer

Histogram

Answer

Summary

Question 4

In Prometheus client libraries, what does calling `Inc()` on a Counter do?

Accepted Answer

Increments the counter value by 1

Answer

Initializes the counter at 1 and resets it on subsequent calls

Answer

Increments the counter by the current timestamp in milliseconds

Answer

Decrements the counter by 1 (alias for Dec())

Question 5

What does the Prometheus blackbox_exporter do?

Accepted Answer

Probes external endpoints via HTTP, TCP, ICMP, or DNS and reports availability and latency metrics

Answer

Exports metrics from black-box encrypted data stores

Answer

Monitors Prometheus itself for internal health metrics

Answer

Scrapes metrics from containers without instrumentation

Question 6

Which Prometheus metric type is best suited for measuring request latency distributions with configurable quantile calculations?

Accepted Answer

Summary

Answer

Histogram

Answer

Gauge

Answer

Counter