Prometheus Certified Associate study guide
Prometheus Certified Associate · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA) is a pre-professional certification from the Linux Foundation that validates foundational knowledge of observability and hands-on skill with Prometheus, the open source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit. It is aimed at engineers and application developers with a special interest in observability and monitoring; the source notes that ideal candidates may already hold Kubernetes certifications such as KCNA, CKA, or CKAD, or have completed Prometheus-specific training or cloud engineer bootcamps. There are no prerequisites. The exam is delivered online, is proctored, and uses multiple-choice questions, with a duration of 90 minutes. The Prometheus Certified Associate study guide has 5 sections and about 1,494 words.
01Observability Concepts
Observability Concepts tests whether you can choose the right signals, define reliability targets, and reason about the cost of measurement. Prometheus is a metrics system, so expect questions on where metrics fit beside logs and traces, and why label dimensions drive both usefulness and expense.
298 words, about 1 min02Prometheus Fundamentals
Prometheus Fundamentals covers the server data model and lifecycle: how targets are discovered and scraped, how samples become time series, and how storage, remote write, and federation fit together. The exam favors concrete configuration and data-model reasoning.
298 words, about 1 min03PromQL
PromQL tests selection, rate logic, aggregation, and histogram math. Expect questions that ask why a query returns nothing, why a ratio is wrong, or which function handles counter resets.
309 words, about 2 min04Instrumentation and Exporters
Instrumentation and Exporters tests whether you can expose useful metrics without breaking cardinality or semantics. It covers client libraries, metric types, naming, and the exporter pattern.
291 words, about 1 min05Alerting & Dashboarding
Alerting & Dashboarding tests the path from a PromQL expression to a useful page or ticket, and from raw series to a dashboard that survives real traffic. Know rule evaluation, Alertmanager behavior, and panel query hygiene.
298 words, about 1 min