Practice Test Geeks(PCA) Prometheus Certified Associate Practice Test
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Prometheus Architecture & Components Flashcards

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  1. Which Prometheus component is responsible for short-term storage of time-series data on local disk?

    Answer: TSDB (Time Series Database)

    Prometheus uses its built-in TSDB to store scraped samples locally on disk in a compressed, chunked format.

  2. What is the default retention period for data stored in Prometheus's local TSDB?

    Answer: 15 days

    By default, Prometheus retains local TSDB data for 15 days unless overridden with --storage.tsdb.retention.time.

  3. Which component would you use to expose batch job metrics when the job does not run long enough to be scraped?

    Answer: Pushgateway

    The Pushgateway acts as an intermediary that accepts pushed metrics from short-lived jobs so Prometheus can scrape them later.

  4. In Prometheus's federation model, what type of Prometheus instance scrapes metrics from other Prometheus instances?

    Answer: Global Prometheus

    A global (or federated) Prometheus scrapes aggregated or filtered metrics from multiple leaf Prometheus servers via their /federate endpoint.

  5. Which HTTP endpoint does Prometheus expose so that another Prometheus instance can scrape a subset of its metrics?

    Answer: /federate

    The /federate endpoint accepts match[] query parameters and returns matching time-series in Prometheus text format for hierarchical federation.

  6. What role does the Prometheus service discovery mechanism play in the architecture?

    Answer: It dynamically finds scrape targets without static configuration

    Service discovery (e.g., Kubernetes SD, Consul SD) allows Prometheus to automatically detect and update scrape targets as infrastructure changes.

  7. Which Prometheus internal component evaluates recording and alerting rules at regular intervals?

    Answer: Rule evaluation engine

    Prometheus's rule evaluation engine runs at a configurable interval (evaluation_interval) and computes rule results, storing them or forwarding alerts.