Prometheus Certified Associate Questions and Answers
300 questions organized by topic with detailed explanations
Linux Foundation
PCA
300 questions
5 topics
Updated Jul 2026Observability Concepts
54 questions13 easy29 medium12 hard~18% of exam
An SRE wants a monitoring system that still gives useful answers during an outage even if remote storage is unavailable....An operator wants a simple built-in signal showing whether each target was reachable on its last scrape before writing m...A service starts adding the label `environment='prod'` to a metric that previously had no `environment` label. What happ...
Prometheus Fundamentals
60 questions17 easy30 medium13 hard~20% of exam
A target already exposes a `job` label, and the scrape config leaves `honor_labels` at its default value of `false`. How...A target passes through relabeling, and no rule explicitly sets the `instance` label. What value does Prometheus use for...A target already exposes an `instance` label, and the scrape config sets `honor_labels: true`. What is the result?
An operator sees the annotation `input to histogram_quantile needed to be fixed for monotonicity` after aggregating clas...A recording rule should store a per-second counter rate so later queries stay consistent. Which function should the rule...What data type does the selector `http_requests_total[5m]` return in PromQL?
Instrumentation and Exporters
48 questions14 easy20 medium14 hard~16% of exam
A custom exporter collector updates global metric objects in place on every scrape. Why is that discouraged for non-triv...A developer wants to expose how long it has been since the last successful sync. What is the recommended Prometheus appr...A team proposes adding a `user_id` label to a high-volume request metric so every user's traffic can be queried directly...
Alerting & Dashboarding
54 questions16 easy28 medium10 hard~18% of exam
An alert matches one child route in Alertmanager, but the team also wants it to keep evaluating subsequent sibling route...Where is the built-in Prometheus expression browser available, and what is it mainly used for?A team wants a cluster-wide outage alert to suppress less important alerts from the same cluster while the major outage ...
All Questions
| # | Question | Topic | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | An alert matches one child route in Alertmanager, but the team also wants it to keep evaluating subs... | Alerting & Dashboarding | hard |
| 2 | A custom exporter collector updates global metric objects in place on every scrape. Why is that disc... | Instrumentation and Exporters | hard |
| 3 | An SRE wants a monitoring system that still gives useful answers during an outage even if remote sto... | Observability Concepts | medium |
| 4 | A developer wants to expose how long it has been since the last successful sync. What is the recomme... | Instrumentation and Exporters | easy |
| 5 | An operator wants a simple built-in signal showing whether each target was reachable on its last scr... | Observability Concepts | hard |
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