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. What is the primary difference between a Counter and a Gauge metric type in Prometheus?

    Answer: Counters only increase (or reset to zero); Gauges can go up or down

    A Counter is a monotonically increasing value (e.g., total requests), while a Gauge represents an instantaneous value that can rise or fall (e.g., current memory usage).

  2. Which Prometheus configuration file section defines how often the server scrapes each target?

    Answer: global.scrape_interval

    The global.scrape_interval setting (default 1m) controls how frequently Prometheus sends HTTP requests to each target's /metrics endpoint.

  3. What is the role of the 'Retrieval' subsystem within the Prometheus server?

    Answer: It manages the scrape loops that fetch metrics from configured targets

    The Retrieval subsystem maintains per-target scrape goroutines, sends HTTP GET requests, parses the exposition format, and passes samples to the storage layer.

  4. When Prometheus is deployed in a multi-cluster environment, which open-source project extends it with global query view and long-term storage without modifying the Prometheus binary?

    Answer: Thanos

    Thanos sidecars attach to each Prometheus instance, uploading blocks to object storage and exposing a Store API, enabling a global query layer across clusters.

  5. Which label is automatically added by Prometheus to every scraped sample to identify the origin job defined in scrape_configs?

    Answer: job

    Prometheus automatically attaches the 'job' label (set to the job_name value in scrape_configs) to every sample, identifying which scrape configuration group produced it.

  6. What does the Prometheus HTTP API endpoint /api/v1/query_range return?

    Answer: A matrix of values for a PromQL expression evaluated over a time range with a step interval

    /api/v1/query_range evaluates a PromQL expression at multiple evenly-spaced timestamps between start and end, returning a matrix result used for graphing.

  7. In Prometheus architecture, what is the purpose of 'honor_labels: true' in a scrape_config?

    Answer: It preserves conflicting labels from scraped metrics instead of renaming them with an 'exported_' prefix

    When honor_labels is true, Prometheus keeps labels from the scraped data as-is if they conflict with server-added labels, rather than prefixing the scraped ones with 'exported_'.