PCA Exporters & Instrumentation Flashcards
6 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 6 PCA Exporters & Instrumentation flashcards as text
What is the Prometheus exposition format, and which content type does it use?
Answer: A text-based line format exposed over HTTP with Content-Type: text/plain; version=0.0.4
Prometheus's native exposition format is a human-readable text format served over HTTP with the text/plain content type.
What does the `_total` suffix in a Prometheus metric name conventionally indicate?
Answer: The metric is a Counter that only increases over time
By convention, counter metrics are suffixed with _total to signal they are monotonically increasing cumulative counts.
When instrumenting a web server with Prometheus, which metric type should track the total number of HTTP requests served?
Answer: Counter
HTTP requests are a monotonically increasing count, so a Counter is the correct type; you can then use rate() to compute requests per second.
What is the purpose of the `HELP` line in the Prometheus text exposition format?
Answer: It provides a human-readable description of the metric for documentation and UI display
The HELP comment line gives a textual description of what the metric measures, shown in the Prometheus UI and documentation tools.
Which exporter is commonly used to expose PostgreSQL database metrics to Prometheus?
Answer: postgres_exporter
The postgres_exporter (writerside/postgres_exporter) connects to PostgreSQL and exposes database statistics like connections, query counts, and replication lag.
What does the Prometheus Pushgateway allow you to do?
Answer: Push metrics from short-lived jobs to an intermediary that Prometheus can scrape
The Pushgateway accepts metrics pushed from batch jobs or crons that exit before Prometheus can scrape them, holding the last pushed value until overwritten.