Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA)
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…
Description
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.
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.
Who is this 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
Curriculum
Observability Concepts - 18%
Metrics
Understand logs and events
Tracing and Spans
Push vs Pull
Service Discovery
Basics of SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs
Prometheus Fundamentals - 20%
System Architecture
Configuration and Scraping
Understanding Prometheus Limitations
Data Model and Labels
Exposition Format
PromQL - 28%
Selecting Data
Rates and Derivatives
Aggregating over time
Aggregating over dimensions
Binary operators
Histograms
Timestamp Metrics
Instrumentation and Exporters - 16%
Client Libraries
Instrumentation
Exporters
Structuring and naming metrics
Alerting & Dashboarding - 18%
Dashboarding basics
Configuring Alerting rules
Understand and Use Alertmanager
Alerting basics (when, what, and why)
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.
Exam details & resources
How to register & take exam: TBC (Link to FAQ pages of the website)
Linux Foundation Global Certification & Confidentiality Agreement: https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/tc-docs/certification/lf-cert-agreement/
Candidate Handbook: https://training.linuxfoundation.org/go/LFCA-candidate-handbook
Important Instructions: https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/tc-docs/certification/important-instructions-mc
Frequently Asked Questions: https://docs.linuxfoundation.org/tc-docs/certification/faq-mc
PCA Curriculum Overview: https://github.com/cncf/curriculum/blob/master/PCA_Curriculum.pdf