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 role of a Prometheus exporter?
Answer: It translates metrics from a third-party system into the Prometheus exposition format and exposes them on an HTTP endpoint
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.
Which exporter is the standard choice for exposing Linux/Unix OS-level metrics like CPU, memory, and disk to Prometheus?
Answer: node_exporter
The node_exporter exposes hardware and OS metrics from /proc and /sys on Linux hosts in Prometheus exposition format.
What Prometheus metric type should you use to track a value that can both increase and decrease, such as the number of active connections?
Answer: Gauge
Gauges represent values that can arbitrarily go up or down, making them ideal for point-in-time measurements like queue depth or active connections.
In Prometheus client libraries, what does calling `Inc()` on a Counter do?
Answer: Increments the counter value by 1
Calling Inc() on a Prometheus Counter adds exactly 1 to its value; use Add(n) to increment by an arbitrary positive amount.
What does the Prometheus blackbox_exporter do?
Answer: Probes external endpoints via HTTP, TCP, ICMP, or DNS and reports availability and latency metrics
The blackbox_exporter performs synthetic probing of endpoints and exposes probe success, response time, and status code as Prometheus metrics.
Which Prometheus metric type is best suited for measuring request latency distributions with configurable quantile calculations?
Answer: Summary
Summary calculates streaming quantiles (e.g., p50, p99) client-side and exposes them directly, making it suited when you need accurate per-instance quantiles.