Practice Test Geeks(PCA) Prometheus Certified Associate Practice Test
← All PCA Flashcard Decks

Metric Collection & Data Modeling Flashcards

7 cards from real PCA practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.

Read the first 7 Metric Collection & Data Modeling flashcards as text

  1. What is the significance of the `_bucket`, `_sum`, and `_count` suffixes automatically created for a Prometheus Histogram?

    Answer: They are the three separate time series Prometheus stores for every histogram metric

    Prometheus automatically creates three time series for each histogram: `_bucket` (cumulative counts per bucket), `_sum` (total sum of observations), and `_count` (total number of observations).

  2. When using the Prometheus Pushgateway, which HTTP method is used to replace all metrics for a specific job and instance grouping?

    Answer: PUT

    PUT replaces all metrics for the specified job/instance grouping atomically, while POST only updates the provided metrics.

  3. What does the `up` metric that Prometheus automatically generates represent?

    Answer: Whether a scrape target was successfully reached (1) or failed (0)

    Prometheus automatically generates an `up` metric (value 1 for success, 0 for failure) for each scrape target to indicate scrape health.

  4. Which label relabeling action in Prometheus drops a target if the source label matches a given regex?

    Answer: `drop`

    The `drop` relabeling action removes targets from the scrape pool if the source label value matches the specified regular expression.

  5. A Summary metric client-side calculates quantiles over a 10-minute sliding window. What is a key limitation compared to Histograms?

    Answer: Summaries cannot be aggregated across multiple instances in PromQL

    Because Summary quantiles are pre-calculated client-side, they cannot be meaningfully aggregated across multiple instances using PromQL aggregation operators.

  6. What is the role of `metric_relabel_configs` in a Prometheus scrape job configuration?

    Answer: Modifies, drops, or renames metrics after they have been scraped from a target

    `metric_relabel_configs` runs after a scrape completes and allows you to filter, rename, or modify metric labels before they are stored.

  7. In Prometheus, what happens if two different scrape targets expose a metric with the same name and identical label sets?

    Answer: Prometheus stores both, but queries may return duplicate or conflicting data

    Prometheus stores both time series and they appear as duplicates in query results, which can cause incorrect aggregations and misleading data.