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

An exporter is a bridge that reads metrics from a system that doesn't natively support Prometheus and exposes them in Prometheus text format for scraping.

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

The node_exporter exposes hardware and OS metrics from /proc and /sys on Linux hosts in Prometheus exposition format.

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

Gauges represent values that can arbitrarily go up or down, making them ideal for point-in-time measurements like queue depth or active connections.

Question 4

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

Accepted Answer

Increments the counter value by 1

Answer

Calling Inc() on a Prometheus Counter adds exactly 1 to its value; use Add(n) to increment by an arbitrary positive amount.

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

The blackbox_exporter performs synthetic probing of endpoints and exposes probe success, response time, and status code as Prometheus metrics.

(PCA) Prometheus Certified Associate Practice Test

(PCA) Prometheus Certified Associate Practice Test

PCA PCA Exporters & Instrumentation