Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA) Certification Exam

The Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA) certification serves as a foundational credential for professionals looking to specialize in monitoring and observability. 

If you are an engineer, developer, or cloud practitioner who wants to strengthen his ability to track system performance and analyze real-time metrics,

You should have prior experience in Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, or monitoring tools to get the most out of PCA, If you are a beginner you might struggle at the beginning

In this post, we have shared everything that you need to know about the Prometheus Certification Associate exam.

If you want to take a PCA exam or course for your self you can click the button below to get 20% discount now on Pometheus certificaiton.

What is Prometheus Certification Associate (PCA) Exam?

The PCA exam is a certification exam that is designed for engineers and developers who want to upgrade their foundational knowledge of using the Prometheus monitoring system.

The certification exam provides in-depth knowledge of using Prometheus for effective monitoring.

The course covers various topics, including the architecture of Prometheus, writing, querying, and alerting rules, and the best practices for monitoring.

After the completion of this course, the candidate is considered perfect for using the Prometheus monitoring and alerting functionalities. The certified experts can swiftly detect the bottlenecks and rectify any errors during the application creation.

Signup for PCA course at a discount of 25% using the Linux Foundation coupon code on the checkout page.

PCA Exam Information

Category	Details
Duration of Exam	90 minutes
Type of Questions	Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs)
Passing Score	75% or higher
Validity	3 Years
Course Price	$250
Retakes	One
Result	Emailed within 24 hours of passing.

Get PCA Certification Discount

Weightage In Exam

Category	Weightage	Topics Covered
Instrumentation and Exporters	16%	Exporters, Client Libraries, Instrumentation, Structuring and Naming Metrics
Observability Concepts	18%	Metrics, Tracing and Spans, Push vs Pull, Service Discovery, Logs & Events, Basics of SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs
Prometheus Fundamentals	20%	System Architecture, Exposition Format, Data Model & Labels, Configuration & Scraping, Prometheus Limitations
Alerting & Dashboarding	18%	Dashboarding Basics, Configuring Alerting Rules, Using Alertmanager, Alerting Basics (when, what, and why)
PromQL	28%	Histograms, Selecting Data, Binary Operators, Timestamp Metrics, Rates & Derivatives, Aggregating Over Time & Dimensions

How To Register for the Prometheus Certified Associate Course Exam?

To register for the Prometheus Certified Associate exam all you have to do is follow the simple steps below.

Step 1: Click on the link for registering and proceed to the Linux Foundation homepage.

Step 2: After you’ve checked all the details, click on the ‘Enroll Today’ button and you can register a free account here.

Step 3: After signing up, you will be redirected to the checkout page.

Step 4: Click on ‘Enter Payment Information’ and proceed to checkout. Check the terms & conditions box and proceed. 

Upon clicking ‘Place Your Order’, your purchase will be completed. 

PCA Certification Exam Checklist

Before proceeding to register for the exam, we recommend you check out the handbook for the exam. 

Here’s a quick breakdown of the certification exam: 

• Passing marks for the exam is 75%. 
• Make sure to have a webcam and microphone in place. 
• You should have a stable internet connection. 
• The exam is conducted using the PSI Secure Browser. 
• You should have a government ID or Passport to register further. 
• The exam is online proctored. You will be supervised through the webcam. 
• You can appear with one retake if you fail to clear on the first attempt. 
• You can download the secured browser upon clicking  “Launch exam” from the PSI dashboard. Or you can download it during the proctor system check. 
• Candidates should run a trial of using the PSI browser and make sure the machine meets all the technical requirements.

I have also curated a list of the best Linux certifications for 2025 that you need to know.

Who Should Pursue the Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA)?

The PCA exam is perfect for the engineers and developers responsible for designing, developing, and operating Prometheus-based monitoring systems.

It is particularly valuable for:

• System Administrators: If you already managing and maintaining IT systems and applications for the organization.
• DevOps Specialists: If your job profile is to ensure seamless deployment, scaling, and monitoring of cloud and on-premise services.
• Site Reliability Engineers (SREs): If you are an expert who looks after system uptime, performance, and reliability through proactive monitoring.
• Software Developers: Engineers looking to integrate observability into their applications for better insights and debugging.
• Cloud & Monitoring Engineers: Individuals handling metrics collection, alerting, and performance analysis across distributed environments.

This certification is ideal for anyone responsible for designing, implementing, or maintaining Prometheus-based monitoring solutions in a modern infrastructure.

Why you should take it:

With Prometheus becoming a go-to tool for observability, the Linux Foundation introduced the PCA certification to help professionals build real expertise.

While self-learning is great, PCA certification pushes you to understand Prometheus inside out, covering everything from metrics collection to alerting and visualization.

PCA is not just an exam to pass, it gives you confidence to monitor, trubleshoot, and ptimize systems using Prometheus, doesn’t matter if you are develper, DevOps engineer, or SRE, it is suitable to each professional.

Final Thoughts

This is all you should know about the Prometheus Certified Associate exam. Make sure to apply the site-wide discount that we have shared and prepare well for the certification exam.

If you want to know more on the PCA exam you can also checkout what people are asking about PCA course and certification on platforms like Reddit, quora, and other discussion form.

Most PCA exams are for beginners. So, make sure to study in detail and check some sample questions related to the exams.

Frequently Asked Questions