Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA)

The Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA) is an entry-level certification offered by the Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It validates a candidate's foundational knowledge of observability, monitoring, and alerting using Prometheus — the industry-standard open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit. The PCA confirms your ability to build and consume observability data, work with metrics, alerts, and dashboards, and apply best practices for monitoring cloud-native applications and infrastructure.

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What is the Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA)?

Who Should Take This Course?

DevOps engineers and SREs responsible for observability and system reliability
Cloud engineers and platform engineers adopting cloud-native monitoring
Application developers interested in instrumenting their code for observability
Kubernetes administrators who have earned CKA, CKAD, or KCNA certifications
Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) building monitoring and alerting pipelines
Engineers completing cloud engineering bootcamps or observability training
Anyone building or scraping observability data across cloud-native or traditional application stacks

What You Will Learn in the PCA Course

A comprehensive curriculum covering all exam objectives with hands-on labs and real-world practice.

Observability Concepts (18%)

Understand the core principles of modern observability and how they apply to cloud-native systems.

Metrics — what they are, types (counter, gauge, histogram, summary), and how they differ from logs
Logs and events — relationship to metrics and role in observability
Tracing and Spans — distributed tracing concepts and integration with Prometheus
Push vs Pull model — Prometheus pull model vs. push-based systems (e.g., Graphite, InfluxDB)
Service Discovery — static configs and dynamic discovery for scrape targets
Basics of SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs — defining and measuring reliability targets

Prometheus Fundamentals (20%)

Learn the core architecture, configuration, and operational concepts of Prometheus.

Prometheus system architecture — server, exporters, Alertmanager, Pushgateway
Configuration and scraping — prometheus.yml, scrape_configs, relabeling
Understanding Prometheus limitations — scalability, long-term storage, federation
Data model and labels — time series, label sets, and cardinality
Exposition format — text-based format for exposing metrics endpoints

PromQL (28%)

Master Prometheus Query Language for selecting, transforming, and aggregating metrics data.

Selecting data — instant vectors, range vectors, and label matchers
Rates and derivatives — rate(), irate(), increase() for counter-based metrics
Aggregating over time — avg_over_time(), max_over_time(), and subqueries
Aggregating over dimensions — sum, avg, min, max with by() and without() clauses
Binary operators — arithmetic, comparison, and logical operators between vectors
Histograms — histogram_quantile() and working with histogram buckets
Timestamp metrics — time() and using timestamps in PromQL expressions

Instrumentation and Exporters (16%)

Learn how to instrument applications and use exporters to expose metrics to Prometheus.

Client libraries — Go, Java, Python, Ruby Prometheus client libraries
Instrumentation — adding counters, gauges, histograms, and summaries to applications
Exporters — Node Exporter, Blackbox Exporter, MySQL Exporter, and community exporters
Structuring and naming metrics — naming conventions, label best practices, cardinality management

Alerting and Dashboarding (18%)

Configure alerting rules, Alertmanager routing, and visualization dashboards.

Dashboarding basics — Grafana integration with Prometheus as a data source
Configuring alerting rules — alert expressions, labels, annotations, and pending state
Understanding and using Alertmanager — routing, receivers, inhibition, and silencing
Alerting basics — when to alert, what to alert on, and why (symptoms vs. causes)

Course Prerequisites

Pre-requisites training is free when you purchase the course from ProSupport

No formal prerequisites are required — the PCA is an entry-level certification
Familiarity with Linux command line is helpful
Basic understanding of containers and Kubernetes is beneficial (not required)
Exposure to Kubernetes certifications (KCNA, CKA, CKAD) or cloud engineering training is advantageous
Completing the LFS241 (Monitoring Systems and Services with Prometheus) course is recommended as preparation

Exam Information

Everything you need to know about the PCA certification exam.

Exam Component	Details
Exam Name	Prometheus Certified Associate
Exam Code	PCA
Exam Type	Multiple Choice (Online, Proctored)
Total Questions	60
Passing Score	75%
Exam Duration	90 minutes
Language	English
Exam Provider	Linux Foundation / CNCF
Exam Focus	Observability concepts, PromQL, Prometheus architecture, instrumentation, alerting, and dashboarding
Exam Registration	Linux Foundation Training Portal (training.linuxfoundation.org)
Retake Policy	One free retake included with purchase; 12-month exam eligibility window
Certification Validity	2 years