CNCF-OTCA Exam Information and Outline
OpenTelemetry Certified Associate
Syllabus Update Checked on: October 30, 2026
CNCF-OTCA Exam Syllabus & Study Guide
Before you start practicing with our exam simulator, it is essential to understand the
official CNCF-OTCA exam objectives. This course outline serves as your roadmap.
The information below reflects the 2026 syllabus defined by
CNCF.
Below are complete topics detail with latest syllabus and course outline, that will help you good knowledge about exam objectives and topics that you have to prepare. These contents are covered in questions and answers pool of exam.
- Exam Format
- 60 multiple-choice questions; 90 minutes; online proctored
- Fundamentals of Observability (18%)
- Telemetry data types: traces, metrics, logs
- Semantic conventions and instrumentation
- Analysis and outcomes
- The OpenTelemetry API and SDK (46%)
- Data model and composability
- Context propagation and resources
- Tracing, metrics and logs signals
- Sampling and SDK pipelines
- Agents and auto-instrumentation
- The OpenTelemetry Collector (26%)
- Configuration: receivers, processors, exporters, pipelines
- Deployment patterns: agent and gateway
- Scaling and transforming data
- Maintaining and Debugging Observability Pipelines (10%)
- Context propagation issues
- Debugging pipelines and error handling
- Schema management