PCA PCA Exporters & Integrations 1 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: What is the primary role of a Prometheus exporter?
- Sending metrics directly to Grafana
- Translating third-party system metrics into Prometheus exposition format (Correct answer)
- Storing time-series data long-term
- Generating alerting rules automatically
Correct answer: Translating third-party system metrics into Prometheus exposition format
Exporters bridge systems that don't natively expose Prometheus metrics by collecting data from them and serving it in the Prometheus text exposition format.
Question 2: Which exporter is the standard choice for exposing Linux host-level metrics such as CPU, memory, and disk?
- process_exporter
- blackbox_exporter
- node_exporter (Correct answer)
- host_exporter
Correct answer: node_exporter
The `node_exporter` exposes a comprehensive set of hardware and OS metrics from Linux/Unix hosts via `/proc` and `/sys`.
Question 3: What does the Prometheus blackbox_exporter probe?
- Internal application JVM metrics
- External endpoint availability via HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP, and ICMP (Correct answer)
- Database query latency only
- Container runtime metrics
Correct answer: External endpoint availability via HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP, and ICMP
The blackbox_exporter performs synthetic probes over HTTP(S), DNS, TCP, and ICMP to test external endpoint reachability and response time.
Question 4: How does Prometheus scrape the blackbox_exporter to probe a specific target URL?
- The target URL is set in blackbox.yml and scraped at /metrics
- The target URL is passed as a query parameter (?target=) in the scrape URL (Correct answer)
- A separate exporter instance is started per target
- The blackbox_exporter discovers targets via DNS automatically
Correct answer: The target URL is passed as a query parameter (?target=) in the scrape URL
Prometheus passes the probe target as `?target=<url>` (and optionally `?module=`) in the scrape URL to a single blackbox_exporter instance.
Question 5: What metric does the blackbox_exporter expose to indicate whether a probe succeeded?
- probe_status
- probe_success (Correct answer)
- blackbox_probe_ok
- endpoint_up
Correct answer: probe_success
`probe_success` is set to 1 when a probe passes all checks and 0 when any check fails, serving as the primary availability signal.
Question 6: Which exporter is commonly used to expose PostgreSQL database metrics for Prometheus?
- postgres_exporter (Correct answer)
- postgresql_exporter
- db_exporter
- sql_exporter
Correct answer: postgres_exporter
The `postgres_exporter` (by Prometheus Community) connects to PostgreSQL and exposes connection counts, query stats, replication lag, and more.
PCA PCA Exporters & Integrations 1
What is the primary role of a Prometheus exporter?