📊 Observability & Monitoring
Master Prometheus the way the PCA exam tests it — observability concepts, architecture, PromQL, instrumentation, and alerting with Alertmanager and Grafana. Preps you for the Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA) exam.
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Observability concepts
Know when to reach for metrics, logs, or traces, why Prometheus pulls, and how SLOs, error budgets, and the golden signals frame reliability.
Prometheus architecture
See how Prometheus fits together — TSDB storage, scraping and service discovery, relabeling, the labeled data model, and scaling out with remote_write and federation.
Chapter review
Chapter 1 review — Concepts & architecture
Lab: Scrape a target and explore the model · 10-question check
PromQL: selecting & rates
Get fluent in PromQL fundamentals — instant vs range vectors, label matchers, turning counters into rates with rate() and irate(), and shifting time with offset and @.
PromQL: aggregation & functions
Slice data with by/without aggregation, surface outliers with topk, compute p95 latency via histogram_quantile, and join metrics using group_left.
Chapter review
Chapter 2 review — PromQL
Lab: Build the queries that matter · 10-question check
Instrumentation & exporters
Instrument your code the right way — pick between counter, gauge, histogram, and summary, follow naming and label conventions, add exporters, and know the Pushgateway's narrow role.
Alerting & dashboarding
Turn signals into action — write recording and alerting rules with the for clause, tame noise through Alertmanager routing, grouping, inhibition, and silences, then visualize it all in Grafana.
Chapter review
Chapter 3 review — Instrument & alert
Lab: Instrument an app and alert on it · 10-question check
Final exam
Observability & Monitoring — comprehensive capstone
Hands-on capstone + course-wide exam · scored to a role level