IICTI Certified System Administrator

Holders demonstrate that they can apply and evaluate fleet configuration management and drift control at scale, linux internals and performance engineering, windows Server, Active Directory and Entra ID administration and virtualization and hyperconverged platform operations, plus 8 further areas, in realistic professional scenarios, as defined in the AQSCERT scheme for System Administrator.

Who it is for: Professionals working, or preparing to work, in it operations roles.

1. 01Fleet configuration management and drift control at scale7% of the exam

   • Architect configuration management that keeps thousands of servers and endpoints consistent and auditable.
   • Scope: Declarative configuration with Ansible, Puppet, Salt and DSC, immutable vs mutable infrastructure, golden images with Packer, drift detection, GitOps workflows and idempotency design.
2. 02Linux internals and performance engineering13% of the exam

   • Diagnose complex Linux performance and stability problems using kernel-level observability.
   • Scope: systemd and cgroups v2, kernel scheduling and memory management, I/O schedulers, eBPF tooling (bpftrace, BCC), perf and flame graphs, USE method and kernel tuning.
3. 03Windows Server, Active Directory and Entra ID administration10% of the exam

   • Design and secure hybrid Windows identity and management infrastructure against common attack paths.
   • Scope: AD forest and tiering model, Group Policy design, Kerberos and NTLM hardening, AD CS risks, hybrid identity with Entra Connect/Cloud Sync, Intune co-management.
4. 04Virtualization and hyperconverged platform operations4% of the exam

   • Evaluate and operate virtualization platforms for performance, resilience and cost under changing vendor conditions.
   • Scope: VMware vSphere and alternatives (Proxmox, Hyper-V, Nutanix, KVM), resource contention and NUMA, live migration, HA/DRS design, platform migration planning after licensing changes.
5. 05Container and Kubernetes platform administration4% of the exam

   • Lead the operation of production Kubernetes platforms with safe upgrade and recovery procedures.
   • Scope: Kubernetes cluster lifecycle and upgrades, etcd backup, RBAC and Pod Security Standards, CNI and CSI selection, resource quotas, node troubleshooting and managed vs self-hosted trade-offs.
6. 06Enterprise storage, backup and data protection12% of the exam

   • Design storage and backup architectures that meet RPO/RTO targets and withstand ransomware.
   • Scope: SAN/NAS and object storage, ZFS and Ceph, snapshots and replication, 3-2-1-1-0 backup strategy, immutable and air-gapped backups, ransomware-resilient recovery testing.
7. 07System hardening, patching and vulnerability remediation12% of the exam

   • Lead hardening and patch programmes that reduce exposure without compromising service availability.
   • Scope: CIS Benchmarks and DISA STIGs, automated compliance scanning (OpenSCAP), risk-based patch orchestration, kernel live patching, secure boot, TPM and least-privilege administration.
8. 08Observability, SLOs and incident operations11% of the exam

   • Design monitoring and incident processes that detect, triage and resolve service-impacting faults quickly.
   • Scope: Metrics, logs and traces with Prometheus, Grafana and OpenTelemetry, SLO and error budget design, alert fatigue reduction, on-call practice, blameless postmortems.
9. 09Infrastructure as code and automation engineering7% of the exam

   • Architect automated, version-controlled infrastructure delivery with guardrails and safe rollback.
   • Scope: Terraform/OpenTofu state and module design, policy-as-code (OPA, Sentinel), CI/CD for infrastructure, secrets management with Vault, automated testing of infrastructure changes.
10. 10Privileged access, logging and administrative security10% of the exam

    • Design administrative access controls that make privileged activity least-privilege and fully accountable.
    • Scope: PAM and just-in-time access, bastion and session recording, sudo and JEA policy, centralized logging and SIEM forwarding, audit trails, administrative workstation design.
11. 11Capacity planning, cost optimization and hybrid cloud operations5% of the exam

    • Evaluate capacity and placement decisions that balance performance, cost and risk across hybrid estates.
    • Scope: Capacity modelling and forecasting, rightsizing, FinOps practices, hybrid cloud connectivity and operations, workload placement decisions and lifecycle/EOL management.
12. 12Disaster recovery and change governance for infrastructure5% of the exam

    • Lead infrastructure change and DR practices that sustain availability during planned and unplanned events.
    • Scope: DR architecture and runbooks, failover testing, ITIL 4 change enablement, CAB vs automated change risk scoring, maintenance window planning and service continuity alignment.

Question types

Single choice 100%

Delivery

Online (remote proctored), Test centre, On-site (corporate)

Retakes

Up to three attempts within any 12-month period. A 14-day waiting period applies after a first unsuccessful attempt and 30 days after a second. Each retake requires a new booking and fee. Retakes draw a different randomised form from the question bank.

Provisional cut score — psychometric validation is required before live delivery. Blueprint v1.0.

1. 1

   Register

   Create a free account and start the programme.

2. 2

   Practice

   Online practice test (coming soon).

3. 3

   Training

   Optional

   Online course or classroom — or skip it.

4. 4

   Certification

   Independent exam and certification decision.

Training is optional and does not by itself confer certification. Find a training partner