PCA Federation & Remote Storage 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.
Read the first 7 PCA Federation & Remote Storage flashcards as text
What is the primary purpose of Prometheus federation?
Answer: Aggregating metrics from multiple Prometheus servers into a single instance
Federation allows one Prometheus server to scrape selected metrics from another, enabling hierarchical aggregation across clusters or data centers.
Which HTTP endpoint must be exposed on a Prometheus server for another Prometheus to federate from it?
Answer: /federate
The /federate endpoint is specifically designed to allow other Prometheus servers to scrape selected time series from it.
Which query parameter is required when scraping the /federate endpoint to specify which metrics to pull?
Answer: match[]=
The match[] parameter accepts one or more instant vector selectors to specify which metric series should be included in the federation response.
What is the primary use case for hierarchical federation in a large enterprise environment?
Answer: Collecting aggregated metrics from multiple data centers into a global Prometheus
Hierarchical federation is used to build a global Prometheus that scrapes aggregated or pre-recorded metrics from datacenter-level Prometheus servers.
What does the remote_write configuration block in prometheus.yml enable?
Answer: Forwarding sampled metrics to a remote storage backend in near-real-time
remote_write sends metric samples to a compatible remote storage endpoint as they are ingested, enabling long-term or scalable storage.
Which encoding format does Prometheus use by default when sending data via remote_write?
Answer: Protocol Buffers with Snappy compression over HTTPS
Prometheus remote_write serializes metric samples using Protocol Buffers and compresses the payload with Snappy before sending over HTTP(S).
What is the purpose of the remote_read configuration in Prometheus?
Answer: Querying historical metric data from a remote storage system to satisfy PromQL queries
remote_read allows Prometheus to transparently query a remote storage backend for historical data when the local TSDB does not cover the requested time range.