AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate: My exam experience

Hello 👋🏻

Two weeks ago I did the AWS Certified SysOps Administrator – Associate exam. I never really looked with attention to this exam before, as my focus were more on Architect and Development, but I finally decided to take a shot, so today I’ll share my experience on it.

The AWS Certified SysOps Administrator exam

I would like to start by saying that I had a pretty rough time starting the exam. I took the exam online, from home, the same way I do every time, but for this one, I had to go through the whole checking process at least three times, because my exam wasn’t opening after successfully completing all the system verifications. Fortunately, PearsonVUE’s support was very helpful and after about 50 minutes I was able to start the exam. I have two lessons to learn from this experience: Don’t schedule the test too late. My exam was scheduled to start at 10 PM but with the technical issue, it started later, which meant I was already sleepier and more tired; And don’t schedule the exam in a tight period between appointments, as technical issues can significantly extend the exam window.

I finished the exam after 1 hour. With a total of 65 questions, the score needed to pass the exam was 720 and I scored 786 🏅

In general, just like all associate exams I did until now, the questions were short and focus more on which features to use instead of customer use cases. The questions were most of the time focused on operational tasks (obviously), so a lot of how-to’s about IaaS configuration, DR configuration, monitoring configuration and so on.

Most of the knowledge required was within my expectations, so I don’t have much to add in terms of essential knowledge beyond what’s in the exam guide. So I’ll just highlight a few topics to focus on:

• You must be familiar with all features of AWS System Manager as it is the main resource of the exam. For instance, automating processes with RunCommand, how to patch EC2s, how to connect privately to resources, how to connect to EC2’s and so on.
• AWS Config is also mentioned a lot during the test, we questions around keeping compliance and integration with others tools such as GuardDuty and Security Hub.
• The monitoring pillar, goes from reacting to events with EventBridge until CloudWatch configuration details such as Standard Resolution vs High Resolutions

Study guide

My way of studying for any exam is using practice tests. I like to get an idea of the type of questions that will be asked to try to understand the line of thought used to get to the answer. As I usually do, I used the WhizLabs’ practice tests because in addition to the questions and answers, the platform offers explanation about the right AND wrong options, so I normally take the test and read the recommended docs around it.

Have any questions? Reach me out 📲

See you at AWS AI Practitioner Beta 🔥