PCA Storage & Retention 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 Storage & Retention flashcards as text
Which Prometheus feature enables long-term metric storage by sending data to an external system?
Answer: remote_write
remote_write streams scraped metrics to an external storage backend like Thanos, Cortex, or VictoriaMetrics for long-term retention.
What does Prometheus TSDB compaction do?
Answer: Merges and deduplicated smaller blocks into larger, more efficient blocks
Compaction merges multiple small blocks into larger ones and removes deleted or out-of-order samples to improve query efficiency.
What is a Prometheus 'block' on disk?
Answer: An immutable directory containing chunks, an index, and metadata for a fixed time range
A TSDB block is an immutable directory holding compressed chunk files, an inverted index, and a meta.json describing its time range.
Which flag controls how long Prometheus retains data when using time-based retention?
Answer: --storage.tsdb.retention.time
The --storage.tsdb.retention.time flag specifies the maximum age of data blocks before they are deleted.
What is Prometheus federation primarily used for in storage contexts?
Answer: Allowing one Prometheus server to scrape metrics from another Prometheus server
Federation lets a higher-level Prometheus scrape aggregated or selected metrics from one or more other Prometheus instances.
What does the `remote_read` configuration in Prometheus enable?
Answer: Querying historical data from a remote storage backend when local data is unavailable
remote_read allows Prometheus to transparently query an external long-term storage system for data that is no longer in local storage.