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Observability Concepts Questions

Practice questions for Observability Concepts topic in Prometheus Certified Associate. 36 questions covering this domain.

36 questions9 easy17 medium10 hard
Q1
medium

An SRE wants a monitoring system that still gives useful answers during an outage even if remote storage is unavailable. Which Prometheus trait suppor...

Q2
hard

An operator wants a simple built-in signal showing whether each target was reachable on its last scrape before writing more advanced alerts. Which aut...

Q3
medium

A service starts adding the label `environment='prod'` to a metric that previously had no `environment` label. What happens in Prometheus?

Q4
medium

An application currently exposes separate metrics named `http_responses_200_total` and `http_responses_500_total`. Which redesign follows Prometheus g...

Q5
medium

A finance team asks whether Prometheus should be the source of truth for exact per-request billing. What do the official docs say?

Q6
easy

A team runs four identical API processes on four scrapeable endpoints. In Prometheus terminology, what is each individual endpoint called?

Q7
easy

A mentor explains that Prometheus distinguishes one time series from another even when both use the same metric name. What combination uniquely identi...

Q8
hard

A platform team monitors many short-lived and rapidly changing microservice instances. Which Prometheus strength best matches that environment?

Q9
hard

A service-level batch job finishes before Prometheus can scrape it directly. Which Prometheus ecosystem component is intended as the intermediary in t...

Q10
easy

In Prometheus, "cardinality" refers to:

Q11
medium

Where does Prometheus store scraped metric data by default?

Q12
hard

When `sum()` aggregates time series that have different label sets — one series has a `region` label and the other does not — what is the result?

Q13
medium

Prometheus hierarchical federation allows:

Q14
medium

Label names beginning with `__` (double underscore) in Prometheus are:

Q15
medium

In Prometheus, a stale marker is:

Q16
easy

A Prometheus counter is best described as:

Q17
hard

A process exporting `errors_total` restarted, resetting the counter to zero. Which PromQL function correctly accounts for this reset when calculating ...

Q18
medium

When a previously scraped target is removed from the Prometheus configuration, what happens to its time series?

Q19
hard

Why is Prometheus described as a reliable system to consult during an outage?

Q20
easy

A platform team wants to follow one customer request across several services and see each child operation along the path. Which observability signal i...

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