9. Observability & Monitoring¶
8 certs | ~$1,100
Target Certifications¶
- Prometheus Certified Associate (PCA) — ~$250
- Datadog Fundamentals — $100
- Datadog Log Management Fundamentals — $100
- Datadog APM & Distributed Tracing Fundamentals — $100
- New Relic Verified Foundation (NVF) — Free
- New Relic Certified APM Practitioner – Associate (APA) — Free w/ Foundation completion
- New Relic Certified Performance Engineer – Professional (PEP) — $175
- New Relic Certified Reliability Engineer – Professional (REP) — $175
What You'll Learn¶
Metrics, logs, and traces (the three pillars), PromQL, alerting, dashboards, distributed tracing, APM, SLIs/SLOs, incident response workflows
Suggested Learning Path¶
- Start with the free New Relic Foundation cert and Datadog Learning Center courses
- Read Google's SRE books (free online) for observability concepts and SLI/SLO design
- Take PCA after learning PromQL with Prometheus docs, then progress to paid Datadog/New Relic certs
Study Guides¶
- Prometheus: Up & Running — Julien Pivotto, Brian Brazil (O'Reilly, 2nd Edition, 2023)
- Observability Engineering — Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones, George Miranda (O'Reilly, 1st Edition, 2022)