PCA question bank coverage by exam domain
Last updated
The GoldenKube PCA bank is large, but it is thinner on PromQL and Observability Concepts than the official weights, a sizeable mixed set is not tied to one domain, and only part of the bank has written explanations yet. The table shows the live numbers per domain.
| Official domain | Weight | Questions | Share | Gap (pts) | Explained | Topic pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Observability Concepts | 18% | 75 | 14% | −4.2 | 21 | 1 |
| Prometheus Fundamentals | 20% | 112 | 21% | +0.6 | 37 | 1 |
| PromQL | 28% | 121 | 22% | −5.7 | 37 | 1 |
| Instrumentation and Exporters | 16% | 82 | 15% | −0.9 | 26 | 1 |
| Alerting & Dashboarding | 18% | 89 | 16% | −1.6 | 24 | 1 |
| Mixed sets, not tied to one domain (Mixed Practice) | — | 64 | 12% | — | 10 | — |
| Whole bank | 100% | 543 | 100% | — | 155 | 5 |
Counts read from the live PCA bank. Weights as published on the official certification page, checked .
What the table measures
Each row is one official PCA exam domain, in the order and with the weight the Linux Foundation publishes. The question count is read from the GoldenKube PCA bank when the page is served, so it always matches what you can practise today. Share is that count divided by the whole bank, and the gap column is the share minus the official weight, in percentage points: a positive gap means the bank has more questions on that domain than the exam weight alone would suggest, a negative gap means fewer. Explained counts the questions that come with a written explanation, and topic pages counts the public topic pages built from that domain.
Some bank sets use their own domain names; those are mapped to the official domain they cover. Mixed practice sets that span several domains are not forced into one row and are listed separately, which is why the official rows can add up to less than the whole bank.
The weights describe the exam, not this bank. A gap is not an error in the exam or in your preparation, it only tells you where practising here gives you more or less material than the exam is likely to ask about.
Where the PCA bank leans
PromQL carries the highest weight on the PCA exam, and it is also the domain with the largest negative gap here: there are many PromQL questions, but fewer than its weight implies once the whole bank is counted. Observability Concepts is under-covered as well. Prometheus Fundamentals, Instrumentation and Exporters and Alerting and Dashboarding sit close to their weights. The mixed practice set spans several domains and is listed on its own row, and it pulls every official share down a little, so the real PromQL gap is smaller than it first looks. The explained column is the bigger story: a large part of the PCA bank still has no written explanation.
How to use this when you practise PCA
Give PromQL more deliberate time than the bank alone would give it: write queries against a real Prometheus as you go, because the exam rewards reading selectors, functions and aggregation operators fluently. When a question has no explanation, check the answer against the Prometheus documentation before moving on, and use the report button if the answer looks wrong. Topic pages only appear for subdomains with enough explained questions, which is why PCA has fewer of them than its size suggests.
Sources
Independent community project, not affiliated with or endorsed by CNCF or The Linux Foundation.