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Prometheus Certified Associate Guide

Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA): Complete Study Guide and Exam Preparation Tips

In this Prometheus Certified Associate guide, we will look at the resources to prepare for the certification exam and tips for passing the PCA certification

PCA is a Linux Foundation Certification that primarily tests the candidates' knowledge on observability and Prometheus skills. In the DevOps certification category, PCA comes under the Observability certification.

This guide covers everything you need to know about the Prometheus Certified Associate certification.

Prometheus Certified Associate Registration

The first step in the PCA certification exam is registration.

Note: Save 30% Today on PCA certification using the Voucher code given below. This code expires soon.

PCA Exam Voucher: Use coupon DCUBE30 at checkout

Here is what you need to know about the exam.

The PCA exam is to be taken online and it is proctored remotely. It is a closed book exam.
After registration, you get 12 months to schedule the exam.
You get one free retake if you fail on the first attempt. If you miss a scheduled exam for any reason, your second attempt gets nullified.
Within 24 hours of completing the exam, you will get the exam results via email.

PCA Exam Details

I have organized all the PCA exam details in the following table.

Exam Duration	90 minutes.
Total Questions	60
Exam Type	Multiple Choice Exam
Pass Percentage	75% (45 out of 60 questions)
PCA Certification Validity	2 Years
Exam Cost	$250 USD
Free Retake	One Retake
Exam Language	Only English

You can find other details from the following official Linux Foundation documentations.

PCA Exam Instructions: Information about system requirements (PSI Secure Browser), location and ID card requirements.
PCA FAQ's: Commonly asked quested related to PCA exam.

Domains & Competencies

Now that you have a complete understanding of the exam, let's look at the PCA exam syllabus with domains and competencies.

Domain	Concepts	Weightage
Observability Concepts	1. Metrics 2. Understand logs and events 3. Tracing and Spans 4. Push vs Pull 5. Service Discovery 6. Basics of SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs	18%
Prometheus Fundamentals	1. System Architecture 2. Configuration and Scraping 3. Understanding Prometheus 4. Limitations Data Model and 5. Labels Exposition Format	20%
PromQL	1. Selecting Data 2. Rates and Derivatives 3. Aggregating over time 4. Aggregating over dimensions 5. dimensions 6. Binary operators 7. Histograms 8. Timestamp Metrics	28%
Instrumentation and Exporters	1. Client Libraries 2. Instrumentation 3. Exporters 4. Structuring and naming metrics	16%
Alerting & Dashboarding	1. Dashboarding basics 2. Configuring Alerting rules 3. Understand and Use 4. Alertmanager 5. Alerting basics (when, what, and why)	18%

PCA Lab

Even though the PCA is a multiple-choice exam, you need to have a running Prometheus setup to learn the concepts in detail.

You can start with a simple VM-based Prometheus setup and then move on to a Kubernetes-based setup based on the concepts you learn.

The following are the detailed guides that will help you setup a PCA exam lab.

Note: I highly suggest you set up your own lab locally or on the cloud to learn all the Prometheus concepts better

PCA Preparation Guide

I have added all the Prometheus official documentation references and other useful authoritative resources for each concept that comes under the exam syllabus.

Observability Concepts

This section primarily deals with Observability concepts in general.

Resource	Concepts Covered
What is Observability	Metrics Understand logs and events Tracing and Spans
Push vs pull in metrics collecting systems	Push vs Pull
What is Service Discovery?	Service Discovery
SRE Fundamentals	Basics of SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs

Prometheus Fundamentals

This section deals with Prometheus architecture, its components, storage, metric data format, metric labels, and Prometheus limitations.

Resource	Concepts Covered
What is Prometheus?	System Architecture
Prometheus Configuration	Configuration and Scraping
Prometheus Architecture Scalability	Prometheus Limitations
Data Model	Data model and labels
Exposition formats	Prometheus metric data format

PromQL

PromQL (Prometheus Query Language) is the native query language for Prometheus. It lets you select and aggregate prometheus time series data in real time. It helps in analyzing and understanding the metrics scrapped by Prometheus.

Resource	Concepts Covered
Complete PromQL Guide	Selecting Data Rates and Derivatives Aggregating over time Aggregating over dimensions Binary operators Histograms Timestamp Metrics

Instrumentation and Exporters

Instrumentation is a term typically used in application monitoring. In terms of prometheus, it is the process of configuring the application parameters to expose metrics in a format that Prometheus can scrape and store.

Exporters are like agents that capture application metrics and translate them into a data format that Prometheus can understand. For example, Node Exporter translates OS-level metrics like CPU, memory, disk, and network statistics to prometheus specific metric format.

Resource	Concepts Covered
List of client Libraries	Client Libraries
How to Instrument	Instrumentation
Exporters and Integrations	Exporters
Practical Guide to Prometheus Metrics	Structuring and naming metrics

Alerting & Dashboarding

Prometheus comes with a native alerting tool called Alert Manager. It can be configured with prometheus to trigger alerts based on Prometheus alert rules.

You can create Dashboards based on prometheus metrics using tools like Grafana. It support PromQL queries to create dashboards.

Resource	Concepts Covered
Alerting Rules	Configuring Alerting rules
Alert Manager	Understand and Use Alertmanager
Alerting Overview	Alerting basics (when, what, and why)

Conclusion

Preparing for Prometheus Certified Associate required detailed learning of all prometheus related components and monitoring & alerting concepts.

PCA as a whole, not only enhances you knowledge on prometheus, but also on Observability, monitoring and alerting concepts. It will help you in your day-to-day DevOps/SRE job.

Also, if you are preparing of any other Linux Foundation Certifications, check out the Linux Foundation Coupons page to get discounts on all the certifications.