The PCA certification is specifically tailored for professionals who are focused on advancing their careers in the fields of observability and monitoring. It is designed to validate and enhance the expertise of individuals working in these critical areas of system management and operations.

• Engineers and Application Developers: Professionals who are actively involved in developing and managing applications and are keen on integrating observability and monitoring solutions into their workflows.
• Kubernetes Certification Holders: Individuals who have achieved certifications such as the Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA), Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), or Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) and are looking to extend their capabilities in managing Kubernetes environments with Prometheus.
• Participants of Prometheus-Specific Training: Those who have completed specialized training in Prometheus and wish to certify their skills, ensuring they meet industry standards and best practices.
• Cloud Engineer Bootcamp Graduates: Graduates from intensive training programs in cloud engineering who wish to specialize further in metrics collection and monitoring using Prometheus as part of their skill set.

This certification is ideal for those seeking to leverage Prometheus to deliver precise and actionable insights into software applications and infrastructure, enhancing operational efficiency and system reliability.

The PCA certification is crafted to affirm a professional's foundational knowledge in effectively managing and utilizing observability data. It is suitable for those involved in both cloud-native and traditional application stacks.

This certification serves as a testament to the candidate's ability to:

• Build and Scrape Observability Data: Understand the critical aspects of scraping and collecting data within application stacks, whether they are deployed in cloud-native environments or more traditional setups.
• Work with Prometheus: Equip candidates with the fundamental skills necessary to implement Prometheus for monitoring, metrics collection, setting alerts, and designing effective dashboards.

The PCA exam is designed to prepare individuals to proficiently handle the essentials of data monitoring and observability, providing a robust foundation for further specialization in Prometheus and related monitoring tools.

The PCA certification is designed to showcase the candidate's proficiency in using Prometheus for monitoring and observability. It emphasizes their understanding of how to effectively apply this tool to enhance the performance and reliability of cloud native applications and infrastructure.

• Understanding of Best Practices: Demonstrates the candidate's grasp of best practices in monitoring and observability with Prometheus, ensuring they can set up efficient monitoring systems.
• Improvement of Application Performance: Confirms that the candidate can utilize observability data from Prometheus to analyze and enhance application performance systematically.
• Troubleshooting and System Implementation: Verifies that the candidate knows how to use data to troubleshoot and resolve issues within system implementations effectively.
• Data Integration: Illustrates that the candidate understands how to integrate Prometheus data into other systems, enhancing broader IT ecosystem functionalities.

By achieving this certification, professionals ensure they have the necessary skills to effectively deploy Prometheus in a variety of operational environments, making significant contributions to projects involving complex data monitoring and analysis tasks.

The PCA certification offers a comprehensive suite of features to ensure candidates can adequately prepare and demonstrate their skills in a professional and accessible format. Key components of the certification include:

• Online Examination: The PCA exam is administered entirely online, providing flexibility and convenience for candidates globally.
• Certification Validity: Once obtained, the certification is valid for two years, after which re-certification may be required to ensure skills remain up-to-date with industry developments.
• Exam Eligibility Period: Candidates have a 12-month eligibility period from the date of registration to schedule and take the exam, allowing ample time for preparation.
• Retake Opportunity: A single retake is included, offering candidates a second chance should they need it to successfully pass the exam.
• Exam Format: The PCA exam consists of multiple-choice questions designed to assess a candidate’s theoretical and practical understanding of Prometheus.
• Duration of Exam: The exam is 90 minutes long, challenging candidates to demonstrate their competence within a controlled timeframe.

These elements are structured to support a robust assessment of the candidate's abilities, providing a credible and recognized measure of their expertise in using Prometheus for cloud-native application monitoring.

There are no prerequisites for the PCA exam. This certification is designed to be accessible to anyone with an interest in learning and demonstrating proficiency in monitoring and observability using Prometheus. It is suitable for both beginners and experienced professionals who are new to Prometheus but have a background in similar technologies.

This section covers the foundational aspects of observability, which is critical for monitoring modern infrastructures and applications. Key concepts include:

• Metrics: Understand the use of quantitative data measurements to track system performance and health.
• Logs and Events: Learn about the qualitative data that provides contextual insights into what is happening within the application or infrastructure.
• Tracing and Spans: Explore how to track a single user request across multiple services to diagnose issues or optimize performance.
• Push vs Pull: Understand the different methods of data collection, where "push" is data sent by sources to a server, and "pull" is data requested by a server from the sources.
• Service Discovery: Learn mechanisms to automatically discover and monitor services in dynamic environments.
• Basics of SLOs, SLAs, and SLIs: Understand the definitions and differences between Service Level Objectives (SLOs), Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and Service Level Indicators (SLIs).

This section tests a candidate's ability to conceptualize and utilize these fundamental observability tools to monitor and improve system operations.

This part of the syllabus dives into the core components and operations of Prometheus, including:

• System Architecture: Learn about the components that make up the Prometheus monitoring system, including its architecture and integration points.
• Configuration and Scraping: Understand how to configure Prometheus and set up scraping to collect metrics from monitored targets.
• Understanding Prometheus Limitations: Discuss the limitations inherent in Prometheus's design and how to work around them.
• Data Model and Labels: Explore how Prometheus structures data and uses labels to differentiate and filter metrics effectively.
• Exposition Format: Learn about the format used by Prometheus to expose data from applications and services it monitors.

Candidates will be tested on their knowledge and skills in setting up, configuring, and understanding the mechanics of Prometheus.

PromQL (Prometheus Query Language) is essential for extracting valuable insights from data collected by Prometheus. Key areas covered include:

• Selecting Data: Techniques for selecting and filtering data from the database using specific queries.
• Rates and Derivatives: Calculate rates and derivatives to analyze trends over time within your metrics data.
• Aggregating over Time: Methods for summarizing data across time periods to observe long-term trends or patterns.
• Aggregating over Dimensions: Aggregate metrics across different labels to gain insights into grouped data sets.
• Binary Operators: Use binary operators to perform arithmetic and logical operations on data results.
• Histograms: Understand how to use and interpret histograms for distribution analysis.
• Timestamp Metrics: Manage and utilize timestamp data within metrics for time-based analysis.

These skills are crucial for creating effective monitoring strategies and alarms based on the data Prometheus collects.

This section focuses on how to instrument code and use exporters to enable Prometheus to monitor a wide range of applications. Topics include:

• Client Libraries: Use client libraries to instrument application code and expose metrics to Prometheus.
• Instrumentation: Techniques for adding instrumentation to the code to generate useful metrics.
• Exporters: Use exporters for services that do not natively support Prometheus metrics.
• Structuring and Naming Metrics: Best practices for structuring and naming metrics to ensure they are informative and standardized.

Understanding these elements is key to extending Prometheus's monitoring capabilities to various third-party and custom applications.

Effective alerting and dashboarding are crucial for monitoring setups. This syllabus section addresses:

• Dashboarding Basics: Create informative and interactive dashboards for visualizing metrics data.
• Configuring Alerting Rules: Configure rules within Prometheus to trigger alerts based on specific conditions in the monitored data.
• Understand and Use Alertmanager: Manage and route alerts using the Alertmanager to handle alert notifications and silencing.
• Alerting Basics: Principles for when to alert, what to alert on, and why, ensuring alerts are meaningful and actionable.

Candidates will need to demonstrate their ability to effectively set up alerts and dashboards that provide timely and useful information to stakeholders.