OTCA practice examsUpdate in progress
OpenTelemetry Certified Associate
The vendor-neutral instrumentation standard: what OpenTelemetry does and deliberately does not do, traces, metrics and logs with their instruments and context, the API and SDK separation that lets a library be instrumented without imposing telemetry, and instrumentation from automatic through to manual with semantic conventions; then the Collector pipeline where an unreferenced component does not run, head against tail-based sampling and what each constrains, context propagation as the thing that joins a trace, and the agent and gateway deployment patterns.
What you get
Papers are cut from the bank and weighted like the real exam, and no question appears in two of them. Every wrong answer comes back on later days until you have it right.
What the exam covers
| Fundamentals of Observability | 18% |
| The OpenTelemetry API and SDK | 46% |
| The OpenTelemetry Collector | 26% |
| Maintaining and Debugging Observability Pipelines | 10% |
Two sample questions
1. What is gateway mode for a Collector?
- A single process running beside each application
- A sidecar container within each pod
- A shared pool handling data from many agents — correct
- A daemon reading logs from each host
Why: Tail sampling and rate limiting belong there rather than in the agents.
2. What is automatic instrumentation?
- No code changes — correct
- Hand-written span code
- A Collector receiver type
- A storage backend feature
Why: Automatic instrumentation adds telemetry without changing application code.
The real OTCA exam
| Length | 90 minutes |
|---|---|
| Questions | 60 |
| Pass mark | 75% |
| Price | Purchased per attempt through the Linux Foundation, with one free retake |
| Recommended before you sit it | None. Familiarity with observability concepts and a programming language helps. |
| Valid for | 3 years |
Exam facts as published by CNCF / Linux Foundation; always check the vendor’s page before you book.
Study OTCA with Chiron
Chiron is invitation-only while we are in beta, and nothing is for sale yet: invited accounts use every paper, drill and course note for free.