PCA PCA Exporters & Integrations

Question 1

What is the primary role of a Prometheus exporter?

Accepted Answer

Translating third-party system metrics into Prometheus exposition format

Answer

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?

Accepted Answer

node_exporter

Answer

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?

Accepted Answer

External endpoint availability via HTTP, HTTPS, DNS, TCP, and ICMP

Answer

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?

Accepted Answer

The target URL is passed as a query parameter (?target=) in the scrape URL

Answer

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?

Accepted Answer

probe_success

Answer

`probe_success` is set to 1 when a probe passes all checks and 0 when any check fails, serving as the primary availability signal.

(PCA) Prometheus Certified Associate Practice Test

(PCA) Prometheus Certified Associate Practice Test

PCA PCA Exporters & Integrations