PCA practice examsUpdate in progress
Prometheus Certified Associate
The vendor-neutral Prometheus credential: the pull model and why cardinality decides whether a server survives, the four metric types with histograms aggregatable where summaries are not, service discovery with relabelling shaping targets and dropping metrics, and PromQL over instant and range vectors; then recording and alerting rules with the for duration, Alertmanager grouping, routing, inhibition and silencing, instrumentation conventions with the Pushgateway limited to batch jobs, and sharding, federation and remote write for scale.
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
| Observability Concepts | 18% |
| Prometheus Fundamentals | 20% |
| PromQL | 28% |
| Instrumentation and Exporters | 16% |
| Alerting and Dashboarding | 18% |
Two sample questions
1. What does group_wait control?
- How long to wait before repeating a notification
- How long to wait for more alerts before sending — correct
- How long an alert stays firing after resolving
- How long a silence remains in effect
Why: group_interval and repeat_interval govern the later sends.
2. What does aggregation by do?
- Keeps labels — correct
- Drops listed labels
- Selects targets
- Sets retention
Why: by keeps only the listed labels when aggregating; without drops them.
The real PCA 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 monitoring concepts and Linux is assumed. |
| Valid for | 3 years |
Exam facts as published by CNCF / Linux Foundation; always check the vendor’s page before you book.
Study PCA 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.