PCA study guide
PCA · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA) is an entry-level, pre-professional certification from CNCF that validates foundational knowledge of observability and hands-on familiarity 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, and CNCF 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. The PCA study guide has 5 sections and about 1,637 words.
01Observability Concepts
This domain tests how you reason about telemetry rather than how you type queries: the three pillars of metrics, logs, and traces; monitoring versus observability; SLIs, SLOs, and SLAs; and the operational cost of labels and cardinality. Expect questions that ask which signal answers a question or which design choice creates a production problem.
316 words, about 2 min02Prometheus Fundamentals
This domain covers the server architecture and configuration: pull-based scraping, service discovery, the TSDB, job and instance labels, retention, and the roles of Alertmanager and Pushgateway. Questions often test what Prometheus does by default versus what you must configure.
319 words, about 2 min03PromQL
This domain is the most query-heavy: instant versus range vectors, selectors, functions, aggregation, binary operators, and histogram math. You must read a query and predict its result type, its labels, or its failure.
347 words, about 2 min04Instrumentation and Exporters
This domain tests how metrics get produced: client libraries, metric types, naming, labels, exporters, and Pushgateway. Questions often ask which metric type fits a measurement or which exporter exposes a system.
314 words, about 2 min05Alerting and Dashboarding
This domain covers alerting rules, the Alertmanager pipeline, and dashboard design with Grafana and PromQL. Expect questions on rule YAML, alert states, routing, grouping, inhibition, silences, and panel queries.
341 words, about 2 min