Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA)— Tips on how to pass the exam

7 min readSep 17, 2023

Welcome to a journey that promises to elevate your understanding and mastery of Prometheus! Whether you’re just starting your Prometheus certification journey or seeking valuable insights to bolster your preparation, you’ve come to the right place.

Commencement Prep

Becoming a Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA) is no small feat, but it’s a rewarding step toward validating your expertise in this powerful monitoring and alerting tool. This blog post is crafted with the sincere intention of guiding you through the process, offering tips, tricks, and encouragement along the way.

I understand that embarking on this certification path can be both exciting and challenging. My aim here is to provide you with not just the technical advice you need to excel in the PCA exam but also the human touch that reminds you that you’re not alone in this journey. I’ve been where you are, and we know that with the right guidance and support, you can succeed. Right below is my badge when I took it in April of 2023.

https://www.credly.com/badges/51b3663f-83b6-4971-a18b-c4bb320f56ab/public_url

So, let’s dive into the world of Prometheus, arm you with the knowledge and strategies you need, and set you on the path to becoming a Prometheus Certified Associate. Remember, your dedication and passion for Prometheus have already brought you this far, and I am here to help you reach that next milestone.

Let’s get started!

Intro

Prometheus stands as a prominent open-source solution within the realm of monitoring and alerting systems. Its primary function is to diligently gather and consolidate metric data, which it then systematically stores in a specialized database designed for time-series data. This data collection process is orchestrated through a procedure known as “scraping,” where Prometheus meticulously retrieves metric information from designated targets. These targets play a pivotal role by making their metrics accessible through an HTTP endpoint, allowing Prometheus to fetch and process this vital data.

It’s worth noting that the origins of Prometheus trace back to the talented minds at SoundCloud. They envisioned and engineered this robust monitoring and alerting tool, harnessing its capabilities to meet their needs and industry demands. As a testament to its reliability and utility, Prometheus earned recognition and endorsement within the technology community, ultimately becoming an integral part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s esteemed portfolio in the year 2016.

In essence, Prometheus embodies a testament to collaborative innovation and community-driven excellence, making it a cornerstone in the world of modern monitoring and alerting systems.

About the Certification

The exam focuses on how this tool can help you build a solid foundation for observability using the Prometheus itself, open-source systems monitoring, and alerting.

It is a pre-professional certification that will require that you have already worked with monitoring systems and know-how systems use observability nowadays. This is not a pre-requisite but will help you a lot to understand general scenarios from the exam and your daily work itself.

The certification follows the same pattern present in the other certifications from CNCF, like CKA, CKS, and CKAD. However, with the focus on data monitoring, metrics, alerts, and dashboards.

Remember that the certification will guide you through best practices for monitoring cloud-native applications and infrastructure with Prometheus, and it is not a stamp that you know everything.

Exam Details

The exam has 90 minutes, and you will be prompted with 60 questions. Based on my experience, I think that is enough time because the most general questions are not so extensive. However, there are some tricky questions that, even though you probably know, you will have to think twice before answering.

For those questions that I felt in doubt and not sure to answer, I marked them for review and tried not to expanse more than 3–4 minutes on this kind of question. Some people recommend spending 3 minutes, but, in my case, there were questions that I spent less than 1 minute to answer. So, because of those questions, I gave myself the pleasure to spend 3–4 minutes per question.

Domains

Observability Concepts — 18%

In this section, try to understand the role of the Prometheus in Observability's current scenario. It is known that the traditional topics that come to mind when someone talks about this topic are the three pillars: Traces, Logs, and Metrics. Even that is outdated, with some signals getting more known, like Profiling Data and so on, it is important to know where Prometheus comes to help. Is it Logs? Is it Metrics? What is Pull, and What is Push? This could sound obvious, but in the exam, this kind of question will be on the table. Be sure that you know enough about Observability standards before the exam.

For the case of Metrics, you will have to master:
- Service Level Objects (SLO),
- Service Level Agreements (SLA) and
- Service Level Indicators (SLI).

This is very important because the exam will demand this knowledge from you. If you want to know more about these topics, see my blog post here at Medium, where I clarify each mentioned point here.

Finally, some questions about Distributed Tracing could be present. Be comfortable with the Trace definition and Spans.

2. Prometheus Fundamentals — 20%

About this topic, there is no workaround. You will need to know about the Prometheus Basics, Prometheus Architecture, How to install Prometheus via package, via systemd, Node Exporter & Node Exporter systemd, Prometheus Security, and Prometheus Metric Types.

3. PromQL — 28%

The weight of this topic is the biggest, so pay attention and try to master the maximum of this topic. Disclaimer — this is not an easy topic. Demands experience and knowledge about queries and, more specifically, Prometheus Query. However, it is not impossible.

Selectors & Macthers
Offset Modifiers
Operators
Functions
- rate() vs irate() — It is important to understand this topic well. In this blog post, we can see a really good example of how each one works.
Subquery
Histogram and Summary
- It is very important to understand the difference between the both. Histogram focuses on aggregated buckets of data, while Summary summarizes data with quantiles, making it more versatile for analyzing distributions
Recording Rules

4. Instrumentation and Exporters — 16%

In this section, you will have to face the case of Instrumentation Client Libraries and the Instrumentation Guide from the official doc.

In most cases, you will have an application written in some framework or language. You will have to handle the import of necessary libs. You must understand the necessary endpoints and use the metric type, like the Counter in this example, for a Python client.

You also can make the use of labels.

5. Alerting & Dashboarding — 18%

And the last but not the least: Alerting.

Here, you will be faced with the AlertManager. In this section, we have the Prometheus allowing the definition of condition that can match with trigger alerts. These conditions can be defined via PromQL expressions.

The Prometheus will not send notifications for the via you choose, like emails, text, pager duty, etc. It will only be responsible for triggering the alerts. The AlertManager will be the key that takes care of a separate process and sends the notifications.

5.1 AlertManager Architecture

5.2 Clauses

Keep in mind that you need to know the clauses. The For, labels, and annotations clauses.

5.3 Practice

To finish this topic, my true recommendation is practice. In my case, when I took the certification, I was involved in some cases with the alertmanager, and it helped me a lot to understand the patterns and the right clauses. In the material recommendation, I will drop a course that contains some lab scenarios and, of course, will give you a plus.

Personal Tips

Practice, and do not spend too much time to take the exam. I personally spent 1 month and a half studying for the certification. The first half was spent reading and watching classes and a course from KodeKloud.com. However, I spent one year working closely with Prometheus and Prometheus Operator. This experience gave me a lot of benefits and helped me to answer some questions involving tricky questions with Relabeling in Prometheus.

Read the Candidate Handbook

Material Course

Absolutely unquestionable, the content that helped to thrive this certification was the Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA) from KodeKloud Platform. The teacher here really gets deep into the contents and explains very well each topic that you need to take the PCA Exam.

I truly recommend that you follow the classes and the scenario labs. I ensure that if you do everything exposed in the course and take the Mock Exam, you will have a great chance to achieve the certification with success. So, I will mention some material that helped me through my journey to the certification.

Conclusion

If you finally get here, I want to thank you for your time spent here reading my recommendations. As you’ve discovered in this guide, preparation, persistence, and a passion for Prometheus are the keys to success.

So, your journey to becoming a Prometheus Certified Associate is a testament to your dedication and passion for mastering this essential tool. As you prepare for the exam armed with the valuable tips and insights shared here, remember that this is not just a certification but a stepping stone toward greater expertise and exciting opportunities in the world of Prometheus monitoring.

Embrace the learning process, stay persistent in your efforts, and always keep your curiosity alive. Along the way, don’t hesitate to seek support from the Prometheus community and mentors who share your passion. With determination and the knowledge you’ve gained, there’s no doubt that you’ll achieve success in your PCA exam and beyond.