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

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  1. Which Prometheus component resolves, groups, deduplicates, and routes alerts to notification receivers?

    Answer: Alertmanager

    Alertmanager receives alerts from Prometheus, applies grouping and inhibition rules, deduplicates repeats, and routes them to configured receivers like PagerDuty or Slack.

  2. What is 'relabeling' used for in Prometheus's scrape configuration?

    Answer: Transforming or filtering labels on targets or scraped samples before storage

    Relabeling (relabel_configs and metric_relabel_configs) allows operators to add, rename, drop, or filter labels at scrape time before samples are stored.

  3. In a Kubernetes deployment, which Prometheus service discovery type watches the Kubernetes API server for pod and service changes?

    Answer: kubernetes_sd_configs

    kubernetes_sd_configs instructs Prometheus to watch Kubernetes API resources (pods, services, endpoints, nodes) and dynamically update scrape targets.

  4. What is the purpose of the '__address__' label in Prometheus service discovery?

    Answer: It specifies the host:port of the scrape target before relabeling

    The __address__ label is set by service discovery to the host:port of each discovered target and is used (after relabeling) to form the scrape URL.

  5. Which exporter is the standard choice for exposing Linux/Unix host-level metrics (CPU, memory, disk) to Prometheus?

    Answer: Node Exporter

    Node Exporter is the official Prometheus exporter that reads /proc and /sys to expose hardware and OS metrics from Linux hosts.

  6. What does the Prometheus remote_read feature enable?

    Answer: Querying historical data from a remote storage backend via Prometheus's query API

    Remote read allows Prometheus to transparently query a long-term storage backend (like Thanos or Cortex) for data outside its local retention window.

  7. Which Prometheus architectural characteristic makes it simple to deploy but limits horizontal write scalability?

    Answer: It is a single-binary, pull-based server with local storage only by default

    Prometheus ships as one self-contained binary with embedded TSDB; this simplicity is a design goal, but it means a single server cannot natively shard write load.