Introduction
I recently sat for and passed the Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA) exam last weekend. The PCA exam is for those with an interest in observability and monitoring. I have been working on service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs) recently in my day job. I was interested in taking this exam because I was keen on learning more about how observability works with Kubernetes and learning how to use PromQL.
Understanding the Prometheus Exam
The PCA exam is an exam from CNCF and The Linux Foundation covers concepts such as observability, Prometheus fundamentals, PromQL, instrumentations, and alerting/dashboarding. The exam is multiple choice and you have 90 minutes to complete the exam. The exam cost is $250 but if you check out the devopscube website, Bibin frequently has discounts for the Linux Foundation exams.
Preparing for the Exam
I used two resources to prepare for the exam:
- KodeKloud’s Prometheus Certified Associate course
- Udemy’s Prometheus | The Complete Hands-On for Monitoring & Alerting
You can likely pass the exam by just using the KodeKloud course, but I learned a lot of additional information by using the Udemy course as well. My goal wasn’t just to pass the exam – I wanted to practice hands-on examples too. I also created my own set of flashcards to practice with. For multiple-choice exams, flashcards are the easiest method for me to learn and retain information. I’m thinking about creating a GitHub repo with the questions and answers I came up with. After I complete setting up the repo, I’ll link it back here.
I took about 4 weeks to prepare for this exam and go through both resources.
Exam Experience
I accidentally updated my Mac OS to Ventura the night before the exam. Fifteen minutes before my scheduled exam time, I ran the system requirements check and found that Ventura was not a supported OS for the exam. Just to note, for the exam, new operating systems are supported within 30 days of a new OS release. I had to do a quick switch to my Linux laptop and all was well.
The check process was quick and easy.
I went through the exam fairly quickly and just flagged questions that I was unsure of for follow-up at the end. After I completed the first review of all questions in about 30 minutes and then I took another 30 minutes to just review any questions I had flagged. I did not feel any pressure for time, unlike when I took the CKA exam!
After submitting the exam, exactly 24 hours later, I received confirmation that I passed the exam!
Conclusion
All in all, I found this exam to be pretty straightforward and relatively easy. I do find that multiple-choice exams are easier than performance-based exams. I’m curious if the Linux Foundation will create a more difficult, performance-based exam in the future.
I did learn a lot about monitoring and observability while studying for this exam though and for me, the learning is more important than the actual certification, but I’ll still take the badge 🙂 .
Additional Resources
The official Linux Foundation Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA) page.