Certification > Clouds and Containers > Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA)
CERTIFICATION

Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA)

The Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA) exam demonstrates an engineers foundational knowledge of observability and skills using Prometheus, the open source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

Now Available! You can bundle PCA with an annual THRIVE subscription to get access to more than 100 educational products and SkillCreds for only $495!

Who Is It For

The PCA is a pre-professional certification designed for an engineer or application developer with special interests in observability and monitoring.
Ideal candidates may have achieved Kubernetes certifications such as KCNA, CKA, or CKAD or have completed Prometheus-specific training or Cloud Engineer bootcamps
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About This Certification

A certified PCA will confirm foundational knowledge for building or scraping observability data in the application stack whether or not it is cloud native.
The PCA exam is intended to prepare candidates to work with the fundamentals of data monitoring, metrics, alerts, and dashboards using Prometheus.
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What It Demonstrates

The PCA demonstrates a candidate's understanding of best practices for monitoring cloud native applications and infrastructure using Prometheus.
A PCA digital credential ensures the candidate understands how to use observability data to improve application performance, troubleshoot system implementations, and feed that data into other systems.
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Domains & Competencies
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Observability Concepts18%
Metrics
Understand logs and events
Tracing and Spans
Push vs Pull
Service Discovery
Basics of SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs
Prometheus Fundamentals20%
System Architecture
Configuration and Scraping
Understanding Prometheus Limitations
Data Model and Labels
Exposition Format
PromQL28%
Selecting Data
Rates and Derivatives
Aggregating over time
Aggregating over dimensions
Binary operators
Histograms
Timestamp Metrics
Instrumentation and Exporters16%
Client Libraries
Instrumentation
Exporters
Structuring and naming metrics
Alerting & Dashboarding18%
Dashboarding basics
Configuring Alerting rules
Understand and Use Alertmanager
Alerting basics (when, what, and why)

Prerequisites
There are no pre-requisites for this exam.
Reviews
Aug 2024
The questions were very practical. There were quite a few questions centered around PromQL and instrumentation, which I feel deserved the most attention for real-world applications of this test.
May 2024
Great validation of basic Prometheus and observability knowledge that brings confidence and allows people to speak the same language.