Certification > Clouds and Containers > Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA)

CERTIFICATION

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.

You have three ways to purchase!

1. Certification exam only – $250
2. Certification exam + THRIVE-ONE Annual Subscription (includes unlimited access to all e-Learning courses, SkillCreds, and premium Microlearning content) – $495
3. Certification exam + Monitoring Systems and Services with Prometheus (LFS241) course – $299

Who Is It 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

read less read more

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.

read less read more

What It Demonstrates

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.

read less read more

Domains & Competencies

Expand All

Collapse All

Observability Concepts18%

Metrics
Understand logs and events
Tracing and Spans
Push vs Pull
Service Discovery
Basics of SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs

Prometheus Fundamentals20%

System Architecture
Configuration and Scraping
Understanding Prometheus Limitations
Data Model and Labels
Exposition Format

PromQL28%

Selecting Data
Rates and Derivatives
Aggregating over time
Aggregating over dimensions
Binary operators
Histograms
Timestamp Metrics

Instrumentation and Exporters16%

Client Libraries
Instrumentation
Exporters
Structuring and naming metrics

Alerting & Dashboarding18%

Dashboarding basics
Configuring Alerting rules
Understand and Use Alertmanager
Alerting basics (when, what, and why)

Exam Details & Resources

This exam is an online, proctored, multiple-choice exam.

Prerequisites

There are no pre-requisites for this exam.

Reviews

Mar 2025

It was a good opportunity to learn about functions in promQL, and configurations. I don't use these in my team, as I'm not in charge of maintaining monitoring services, but just a user of them.

Aug 2024

The questions were very practical. There were quite a few questions centered around PromQL and instrumentation, which I feel deserved the most attention for real-world applications of this test.

May 2024

Great validation of basic Prometheus and observability knowledge that brings confidence and allows people to speak the same language.