VALENCIA, Spain – KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe – May 18, 2022 – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, and The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the new Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA) exam. The PCA is a pre-professional certification designed for engineers or application developers with special interests in observability and monitoring within the Prometheus ecosystem.

New associate certification exam from CNCF and The Linux Foundation will test foundational knowledge and skills using Prometheus, the open source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit

The PCA is modeled after Kubernetes certifications such as KCNA, CKA, or CKAD and is intended for candidates who have passed these certifications or have completed Prometheus-specific training or Cloud Engineer bootcamps. The exam is now in Beta testing and will be generally available later in 2022. 

According to CNCF’s 2021 Cloud Native Survey, the use of Prometheus in production has reached 65%, an increase of 43% year-over-year. Production users include organizations like Adidas, Slack, JPMorgan Chase, Verizon, and Uber. Prometheus was the second project to join CNCF in 2016 and the second project to graduate in 2018, following only Kubernetes. 

“As cloud native stacks have grown and matured, observability has become crucial for visibility into application metrics, performance, alerting and insights,” said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. “Prometheus is a key element of this, enabling organizations to build a foundation of observability. The PCA exam will allow developers to demonstrate their proficiency in Prometheus ecosystem and cloud native observability concepts.”

PCA will consist of a multiple-choice, online certification exam testing entry-level skills and knowledge around best practices for monitoring cloud native applications and infrastructure and the ability to improve application performance through observability data. Successful candidates will be able to recognize when something is wrong with an implementation, monitor and gain insight into performance, debug issues, and feed data into other systems, including QA, security, and automation. The existing “Monitoring Systems and Services with Prometheus” training course can be helpful for those new to Prometheus.

“There is an ongoing talent shortage in the cloud space, and the only way to address it is to get more individuals trained and certified in these emerging technologies,” said Clyde Seepersad, SVP, and general manager of training & certification at The Linux Foundation. “We have seen tremendous interest in Prometheus training as adoption of this impactful technology has increased, which is a fantastic starting point. This new certification will allow individuals skilled in this technology to verify their abilities to employers, helping advance their careers while beginning to address this talent gap.”

The exam is being developed in partnership with Certiverse. As demonstrated with The Linux Foundation Certified IT Associate (LFCA) and Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) exams, the company’s online exam development platform brings high-quality certifications to market with the speed required to keep IT content current and relevant.

More information about the exam and topics to be covered in it is available here. Those interested in enrolling in the Beta may do so for free here. Additional details on exam availability will be announced in the coming months. 

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open source software stack in public, private, and hybrid clouds. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) hosts critical components of the global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. CNCF brings together the industry’s top developers, end users, and vendors, and runs the largest open source developer conferences in the world. Supported by more than 500 members, including the world’s largest cloud computing and software companies, as well as over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, please visit www.cncf.io.

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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Katie Meinders

The Linux Foundation

PR@CNCF.io