PCA Mock Exam Simulator

Free Prometheus Certified Associate practice questions with full explanations on every option. Monitoring and alerting with Prometheus and PromQL.

Format

multi-choice

Duration

90 min

Pass mark

75%

Study time

2–8 wks

PCA exam domains

Observability Concepts 18%
Prometheus Fundamentals 20%
PromQL 28%
Instrumentation and Exporters 16%
Alerting & Dashboarding 18%

A free PCA sample question

Observability Concepts

Q1. What is an error budget in SRE practice?

A The monetary cost allocated for fixing bugs
Incorrect. Error budgets are reliability accounting, not financial budgets.
B The number of on-call escalations allowed per engineer per week according to team policy
Incorrect. That describes on-call burden metrics, not error budgets.
C The maximum number of alerts that may fire in production without formal review board approval
Incorrect. Alert volume is a symptom of noise, not an error budget concept.
D Permitted unreliability derived from 1 - SLO
Correct. The error budget equals 1 - SLO applied to the measured window — it quantifies how much unreliability is acceptable before halting risky changes.

Reveal answer and explanations

Start the full PCA mock exam90-min timer · paid plan required

Prerequisites and background knowledge

Basic observability concepts (metrics, logs, traces). Familiarity with Kubernetes helps. No prior Prometheus experience required.

Official reference: cncf.io/training/certification/pca.

More PCA practice resources

PCA exam tips

Where to go after PCA

Once you pass PCA, these certs are natural next steps on the Golden Kubestronaut path:

OTCA — OpenTelemetry Certified Associate CNPA — Certified Cloud Native Platform Engineering Associate

Frequently asked questions about PCA

What is the passing score for PCA?

75%.

How long is the PCA exam?

90 minutes, multi-choice format. See the official CNCF page for the current question count.

How difficult is the PCA exam?

Rated intermediate. Plan 2–8 weeks depending on your background.

How much does the PCA exam cost?

Pricing changes periodically — check the official CNCF PCA page at https://www.cncf.io/training/certification/pca/.

Are these PCA mock exams free?

The sample question on this page is free with no account. Full timed PCA mocks require a paid plan.

How is this mock exam different from the real PCA exam?

Original questions written against the official CNCF curriculum — not scraped dumps. Format mirrors the real exam; the real one is proctored, these are self-paced.

What is the best way to study for PCA?

Work through the official curriculum in order of domain weight (heaviest first), then run full timed mocks until you hit 85%+ consistently.