 Hello everyone. Thanks for having me. This is Alhazane and I want to engineer working forward to TROPAC. Today, I would like to show you my experience in preparing for and taking the all-new Prometheus Certified Associate Certification exam. The Prometheus Certified Associate Certification, as defined by the CNCR, is a pre-professional certification designed for an engineer or application developer with a special interest in observability and monitoring. The main areas the exam covers are the following, observability concepts, Prometheus fundamentals, PROMQL, instrumentation and exporters, alluring and dashboarding. Why should I prepare and take this exam? Well, there are good reasons for that. I think it strengthens the foundation and it motivates to delve deeper into learning more about the cloud-native monitoring ecosystem, besides getting a level of credibility under the belt. So this is where it all started, the opening remark skin-out announcements on Europe 2022. Following my interest registration, I was invited to take online proctor multiple choice Prometheus Certified Associate Vietta exam in July. Now, figuring out where to start could be daunting. Following a proper curriculum eliminates most of the trepidation that comes along with learning a new skill, as it helps to not miss any of the core concepts. As I prepared for the exam, I created a publicly accessible repository on GitHub, where I have linked curator resources to each of the exam's topics, mainly from the official thought-outs, documentation of Prometheus itself, in addition to some excerpts of the Prometheus upper-running book by Breanna Brazil. Before starting with Prometheus, it's worth getting more acquainted with the observatory concepts and terminology, such as metrics, service discovery, and the service-level objective to name a few. Prometheus, beyond doubts, is a major pillar of the cloud-native stacks. This is certainly not Prometheus in two minutes, but it's more of an overview of the Prometheus ecosystem, what capabilities it has, and what to use each for. The Prometheus server components are their trivial components that scrapes metrics from endpoints offered by the discovered targets, the time-serious database where the metrics data gets stored, and the Prometheus HTTP server that offers a rest endpoint along other systems to query metrics data. Regarding instrumentation, Prometheus scrapes metrics from instrumented jobs, either directly or via an intermediary push-get way for short-lived jobs. To collect application-specific metrics, a client library needs to be added to instrument the code in various programming languages. To instrument a third-party system, an exporter can be installed on the host server or next to an application. Another aspect is alerting. Prometheus alert manager is capable of routing alerts to different channels, such as email or Slack. For data visualization, Grafana can be used. Additionally, Prometheus remote write, which is basically sending data to other systems like a warm-term storage. And this is where Thanos, for instance, comes into the picture. If you haven't been working with Prometheus for some time now, I would recommend taking any getting started course, or you can also watch Prometheus' introduction at KubeCon Europe 2020 by Julius Volz, the co-creator of Prometheus. As for Prometheus, it amounts to more than one-fourth of the exam questions, hence the increased importance of knowing how to use it properly, also beyond the exam. Here's an example of a query to get error ratio of an HTTP server for the last 10 minutes. I shout out to Chrome Labs for the ChromeKill cheat sheet. Needless to say, this is not to be memorized, but it does help to get more familiar with the query structure. And last but not least, alerting and dashboarding. Open source tools like Grafana bring life to data through intuitive visualizations of different metrics being monitored. Grafana makes it feasible to see the current state or collected metrics as a graphical representation and to create custom dashboards. Monitoring is often paired with alerting tools that notify engineers when metrics have exceeded or fallen below certain thresholds, specified in accordance with the service level objectives. A tool like Prometheus' alert manager can be used for this purpose, and also it gives ways to filter alerts before sending notifications. So what happens after taking the exam? There is also the exam will be emailed to the exam taker within 24 hours after taking the exam, and if passed, a certification and a badge will be issued. How cool is that? I received the results about five weeks after taking the exam as to as a data one. That is no longer the case as the exam was made generally available last month. I hope you find the information and the resources useful, and I wish you all a great and fruitful KubeCon. Thank you.