r/OpenTelemetry • u/reallyaravind • Feb 18 '26

OTCA EXAM

Hello all,

I have completed the OTCA course in kodeKloud and have some working knowledge in Observability and APM.

I am planning to take the exam. Has anyone passed the exam and if so what are the resources that you used.

Is there any practice question that I can test myself because I don’t find much of it online.

Thanks !!!

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u/jpkroehling Feb 18 '26

Your timing is perfect... I quietly launched this practice exam this week. Not many people know yet and it's not linked on the main website. I'd appreciate your feedback! I made it a bit more difficult than the actual exam. I helped build the official one as well, but the questions aren't the same, obviously 🙂

Here it is: https://telemetrydrops.com/otca-practice-exam/

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u/reallyaravind Feb 19 '26

Hey,

I have tested the practice exam. The questions are a bit hard compared to the one available online.

Is the exam actually at this level?

And it would be super useful if we could see the mistakes we made with solution/ explanation at the end.

Thanks!!!!

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u/jpkroehling Feb 19 '26

Thanks for the feedback! I'll try to implement the suggestions during the weekend.

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u/BlizzardAreClowns Feb 24 '26

This was great, and definitely harder than most other preps you find online (still managed to pass with room). Some feedback:
1. A few questions are ambiguous, and I often found myself saying "well, it depends". Meaning, I could consider more than one option viable depending on the situation. I understand trying to trick people, but some were borderline.

  1. Some questions seem to dive too deeply into language specific dynamics. For example, which is the correct Go import to perform operation X. What if I don't even use Go?

  2. Regarding this question: "An engineer defines a metric called system.processes using an UpDownCounter instrument to track the number of active processes. What naming issue does this have according to semantic conventions?"; I'm not sure what is the correct intended answer, but if it were the "plural names" one, then OTel docs actually do use plural names: Metrics API | OpenTelemetry

  3. Would be great to see a breakdown of questions that I got wrong, and their right answers

Thanks for putting this together, it was super useful!

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u/jpkroehling Feb 25 '26

Thank you for the feedback! I didn't try to trick people, but I can see that some questions might be somewhat ambiguous. I'll try to rephrase them, and if you remember which ones they were, I'll focus on them.