Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA)¶

Someone mentioned the PCA to me and I checked the syllabus out of curiosity. I realized I'd already covered most of it just by learning Prometheus properly. Architecture, PromQL, instrumentation, alerting, retention, federation, remote write, Grafana basics, Operator concepts.

So I took the exam. It was a checkpoint, not a goal.

What it covers¶

The syllabus is well scoped. No surprises if you've spent real time with Prometheus:

• Architecture and design. How Prometheus works, the pull model, service discovery, TSDB internals.
• PromQL. Selectors, functions, aggregations, recording rules. You need to be comfortable writing queries, not just reading them.
• Instrumentation. How to expose metrics from applications, metric types (counter, gauge, histogram, summary), naming conventions.
• Alerting. Alert rules in Prometheus, Alertmanager routing, grouping, silencing, inhibition.
• Dashboarding. Grafana basics, building panels from PromQL queries.
• Storage and retention. Local storage, remote write, remote read, federation.
• Prometheus Operator. ServiceMonitor, PodMonitor, PrometheusRule CRDs.

My advice¶

Don't study for the exam. Study Prometheus. Instrument something real, build a dashboard you care about, create an alert and test the full flow. The cert becomes easy when the fundamentals are solid.

If you've been running Prometheus in any serious capacity, you probably already know most of this. The exam just confirms it.