Monitoring Tools (Prometheus, Grafana) Questions and Answers for Viva

Answer-1: Prometheus is an open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit designed for reliability and scalability, especially for cloud-native environments.

Answer-2: Grafana is an open-source analytics and monitoring platform used to visualize time-series data from sources like Prometheus.

Answer-3: Prometheus metrics are time-series data identified by a metric name and key-value pairs called labels.

Answer-4: A time-series database stores data points indexed in time order, ideal for monitoring and performance data.

Answer-5: Prometheus pulls (scrapes) metrics over HTTP from configured endpoints at regular intervals.

Answer-6: An exporter is a service that exposes metrics from a system or application in a Prometheus-compatible format.

Answer-7: The default port for Prometheus is 9090.

Answer-8: PromQL is Prometheus?s query language used to retrieve and manipulate time-series data.

Answer-9: Grafana dashboards are customizable collections of visual panels used to display data from a connected data source.

Answer-10: Prometheus collects and stores data, while Grafana queries that data and displays it using dashboards.

Answer-11: A scrape interval is the frequency at which Prometheus collects metrics from endpoints.

Answer-12: An alert rule is a condition defined in PromQL that triggers an alert when met.

Answer-13: Alertmanager is a component of Prometheus used to manage alerts, including routing, silencing, and notification.

Answer-14: Prometheus data can be visualized using tools like Grafana or its built-in web UI.

Answer-15: Yes, Grafana supports multiple data sources including InfluxDB, ElasticSearch, Loki, MySQL, and more.

Answer-16: A label is a key-value pair that adds context to a metric, enabling filtering and grouping in queries.

Answer-17: Pushgateway allows short-lived jobs to push metrics to Prometheus, which typically only scrapes data.

Answer-18: node_exporter is a Prometheus exporter for hardware and OS-level metrics exposed by *nix systems.

Answer-19: blackbox_exporter allows probing endpoints like HTTP, DNS, TCP, and ICMP for availability and latency monitoring.

Answer-20: Service discovery helps Prometheus automatically discover targets to monitor without manual configuration.

Answer-21: Grafana offers graphs, heatmaps, bar charts, gauges, tables, and more.

Answer-22: By logging into Grafana, choosing a data source, adding panels, and configuring visualizations.

Answer-23: A data source is the backend system (e.g., Prometheus) from which Grafana queries data.

Answer-24: Yes, Grafana supports alerting on dashboards and sends notifications through various channels.

Answer-25: Variables allow dynamic dashboard elements, enabling users to change views based on selected criteria.

Answer-26: Prometheus stores data locally in a time-series database using an efficient storage engine.

Answer-27: Federation allows a Prometheus server to scrape metrics from another Prometheus instance.

Answer-28: Retention settings define how long Prometheus keeps metrics data (e.g., 15d for 15 days).

Answer-29: Prometheus is written in Go; Grafana is written in Go and TypeScript.

Answer-30: By enabling authentication, role-based access control, and SSL/TLS encryption.

Answer-31: Grafana Loki is a log aggregation system that integrates with Grafana to provide logs alongside metrics.

Answer-32: Yes, using the windows_exporter (formerly WMI exporter).

Answer-33: Histogram is used to observe and bucket values (e.g., request durations) into a series of ranges.

Answer-34: Gauge represents a value that can go up or down, like memory usage or temperature.

Answer-35: Counter is a cumulative metric that increases over time, e.g., number of HTTP requests.

Answer-36: Grafana alert provisioning allows managing alert configurations as code through configuration files.

Answer-37: Scrape config defines how and what targets Prometheus should scrape for metrics.

Answer-38: TSDB (Time Series Database) is Prometheus?s storage engine for storing time-series data.

Answer-39: Grafana Cloud is a managed platform for Prometheus, Loki, and Grafana offered by Grafana Labs.

Answer-40: Yes, Prometheus is widely used with Kubernetes via the kube-prometheus-stack Helm chart.

Answer-41: Grafana uses organizations and user roles to separate and secure data access.

Answer-42: Rule groups group alerting or recording rules and define how often they are evaluated.

Answer-43: Recording rules precompute frequently used queries and store results as new time series for efficiency.

Answer-44: Thanos is an open-source project that adds long-term storage, high availability, and global querying to Prometheus.

Answer-45: Challenges include limited long-term storage, high availability, and scaling with large environments.

Answer-46: By copying the TSDB data directory or using tools like Thanos or Cortex for remote storage.

Answer-47: Grafana dashboards can be shared using links, snapshots, or by exporting and importing JSON.

Answer-48: Prometheus is for data collection and storage; Grafana is for visualization and analytics.

Answer-49: Use histogram or summary metrics to track request durations and analyze with PromQL.

Answer-50: Grafana?s unified alerting system allows defining alerts across any supported data sources and manages them in a single UI.