What the test really feels like on exam day

The current AWS Certified SysOps Administrator exam is not just a pile of recall questions. Expect a mix of standard multiple-choice / multiple-response items plus exam labs. The labs are the part people underestimate. They are not impossible, but they punish shaky operational habits. If you only studied flashcards and service definitions, the labs will expose that fast.

A practical way to think about timing:

You get 65 questions in 130 minutes total.
That works out to roughly 2 minutes per item, but labs consume much more than that.
In practice, the non-lab questions often move quickly if you know your operational patterns, while labs can eat 10–20 minutes each depending on complexity.
You can usually navigate within the exam, but labs break your rhythm. Budget for them mentally before you start.

What mattered for me was treating the exam as two different tests:

Scenario questions: identify the AWS service or operational mechanism that fixes the issue with the least admin overhead.
Labs: execute the fix without getting lost in the console.

The exam likes operational scenarios where something is already deployed and behaving badly: CPU spikes, instances not joining a load balancer, missing logs, failed automation, unhealthy Auto Scaling replacements, blocked network paths, or backups not meeting policy. This is different from architect-style questions that focus on ideal greenfield design. SysOps is about observability, remediation, access, scaling behavior, and cost-aware operations.

One more blunt point: if you have not used the AWS console recently, labs will feel slower than expected. The questions are not testing whether you know a service exists; they are testing whether you know where to go and what setting actually changes the outcome.

Where the score is hiding: the domains to prioritize

If your study time is limited, put the heaviest emphasis on the domains that dominate the exam: Monitoring, Logging, and Remediation, plus Reliability and Business Continuity. Those two areas show up constantly, and many questions blend them with networking or IAM.

The exam blueprint has changed over time, but the practical weighting still feels like this in the question pool: operational visibility first, keeping systems available second, then deployment/change and security/networking woven through the scenarios.

Focus your effort in this order:

CloudWatch
- Metrics vs logs vs alarms vs dashboards.
- Detailed monitoring vs basic monitoring.
- Metric math, anomaly detection, composite alarms, and alarm states.
- CloudWatch Logs agent / unified agent behavior and where logs actually end up.
- Event-driven remediation using EventBridge + Systems Manager Automation or Lambda.
Systems Manager
- Run Command, Patch Manager, State Manager, Session Manager, Automation, Parameter Store.
- Which feature is used for one-time action versus ongoing configuration enforcement.
High availability and recovery
- Auto Scaling replacement behavior, ELB health checks, multi-AZ patterns, Route 53 failover, EBS snapshots, RDS backups, and DR tradeoffs.
Networking operations
- Security groups, NACLs, route tables, VPC endpoints, NAT gateways, DNS resolution, VPC peering limitations, Transit Gateway basics.
Identity and access in operations
- Instance profiles, service roles, cross-account access, KMS permissions, S3 bucket policy interactions.

A lot of candidates overinvest in broad EC2 theory and underinvest in service interactions. On this exam, Amazon loves chains like:

CloudWatch alarm -> EventBridge rule -> Systems Manager Automation
Auto Scaling group -> target group health check -> instance replacement
S3 encryption -> KMS key policy -> access denied during backup or log delivery
VPC endpoint policy -> IAM policy -> application cannot reach service privately

If you can reason through those chains, you gain points much faster than memorizing isolated facts.

CloudWatch and Systems Manager: the pair that keeps coming back

If I had to name the single most exam-critical combination, it would be CloudWatch + Systems Manager. Amazon repeatedly frames questions around detecting an issue and remediating it automatically with the least operational overhead.

The traps here are subtle:

CloudWatch metrics are not the same thing as CloudWatch Logs. A question may mention application errors in /var/log/...; that points toward logs, log filters, or the CloudWatch agent, not EC2 default metrics.
Detailed monitoring matters when alarm frequency or granularity matters. If the question expects faster visibility than the default EC2 interval, that is your clue.
State Manager is for keeping instances in a desired state over time. Run Command is more of an immediate task execution tool. The exam will tempt you to pick Run Command for something that really requires continuous enforcement.
Parameter Store vs Secrets Manager can be a distractor. If the question is about configuration values and operational scripts, Parameter Store often fits. If it is rotation-heavy credential storage, Secrets Manager is the better answer.

Patterns I saw repeatedly:

An instance fleet needs patching on a schedule with reporting. Think Patch Manager and maintenance windows, not hand-built cron jobs.
Admins need shell access to private instances without bastions. Think Session Manager, plus the IAM permissions and SSM agent prerequisites.
A metric threshold should trigger a known recovery action. Think CloudWatch alarm with an action or event-driven automation, not manual SNS-only notification if the prompt emphasizes remediation.
Config drift must be prevented or corrected. Think State Manager, sometimes paired with Automation.

Watch for wording like "operationally efficient," "minimal manual intervention," "automatically remediate," and "across a fleet". That wording strongly favors Systems Manager or event-driven AWS-native tooling over custom scripts on each instance.

A common gotcha is assuming Session Manager just works. In exam scenarios, validate the prerequisites mentally:

SSM Agent installed and running
IAM instance profile allows Systems Manager actions
Network path to SSM endpoints, either internet/NAT or VPC endpoints

If a private subnet instance cannot connect to Session Manager, the answer is often not IAM alone. It may be missing interface VPC endpoints for Systems Manager-related services or lacking outbound access.

Another thing Amazon likes: log retention and cost control. If the scenario mentions compliance retention periods or reducing storage cost for logs, look at CloudWatch Logs retention settings, export patterns, or S3 lifecycle usage rather than leaving logs indefinite by default.

Networking questions are rarely about theory; they’re about finding the break

The networking section of this exam is very operational. These are not abstract CIDR math puzzles most of the time. They are usually troubleshooting chains: traffic should flow, but something in the path is wrong.

The fastest way to parse these questions is to mentally check the path in order:

DNS resolution
Route table
Security group
Network ACL
Internet gateway / NAT gateway / VPC endpoint / peering / Transit Gateway
Target health or application listener behavior

Specific traps that show up a lot:

Security groups are stateful; NACLs are stateless. If return traffic is the issue, NACLs are often the hidden problem.
VPC peering is not transitive. If the question implies VPC A can reach VPC C through VPC B, that is a trap unless another service like Transit Gateway is involved.
NAT gateways allow outbound internet for private subnets; they do not allow inbound internet access to those instances. Sounds basic, but AWS wraps this in scenario language that makes people second-guess.
Gateway endpoints vs interface endpoints matter. S3 and DynamoDB are common gateway endpoint answers; many other services use interface endpoints.
Route 53 private hosted zones only resolve where associated. If name resolution is failing between VPCs, check association and DNS support settings, not just security groups.

When you see load balancing questions, focus on health check behavior:

If an Auto Scaling group keeps replacing instances, verify whether the issue is ELB health checks versus EC2 status checks.
If traffic is not reaching targets, confirm the target group protocol/port and the app actually listening there.
If the exam says users intermittently fail over to bad instances, think about health check thresholds, deregistration delay, or target registration state.

Private connectivity questions often hinge on one word:

If the prompt says without traversing the public internet, think VPC endpoints, private connectivity, Direct Connect, VPN, or private ALB/NLB patterns.
If it says lowest operational overhead for AWS service access from private subnets, VPC endpoints are usually stronger than routing through a NAT gateway.

Also know VPC Flow Logs at an exam level. Not every packet detail is available, and people assume flow logs solve every network mystery. They help with accepted/rejected traffic visibility, but they do not replace application logs, DNS logs, or packet capture.

Reliability and recovery: know the AWS-native answer, not the homemade one

A huge chunk of SysOps is Amazon asking: something failed, demand changed, or backup policy was missed — what is the most AWS-native way to recover or stay available? The best answer is usually the one that removes manual steps and uses managed recovery features already built into the platform.

Areas to drill hard:

Auto Scaling behavior
- Launch templates, scaling policies, cooldown/warmup behavior, health checks, desired/min/max capacity.
- Difference between scheduled scaling, dynamic scaling, and predictive patterns.
EBS and EC2 recovery
- Snapshots, AMIs, instance recovery for supported cases, and volume behavior on stop/terminate.
RDS resilience
- Multi-AZ vs read replicas. Amazon loves this distinction.
- Multi-AZ is for availability/failover; read replicas are for scaling reads and can support DR patterns, but they are not the same answer.
Backup governance
- AWS Backup plans, vaults, lifecycle rules, cross-region/cross-account copies.
Route 53 failover and health checks
- Especially where DNS-based failover is simpler than rearchitecting the app.

The classic trap is Multi-AZ vs read replica. If the problem is database availability after an AZ outage, choose Multi-AZ. If the problem is read-heavy traffic, choose read replicas. AWS knows candidates mix these up.

Another trap is choosing snapshots where continuous or policy-based backup management is the real requirement. If the prompt mentions multiple services, retention rules, centralized reporting, or compliance, AWS Backup is often the intended answer rather than service-by-service snapshot scripts.

For EC2 storage questions, pay attention to wording about persistence:

Instance store is ephemeral.
EBS persists independently of instance lifecycle depending on delete-on-termination and volume handling.

On disaster recovery questions, Amazon sometimes wants you to distinguish among backup/restore, pilot light, warm standby, and multi-site. You do not need to write a DR essay in your head; just map the requirement:

Lowest cost, slower recovery: backup/restore
Core environment running, scale up later: pilot light
Scaled-down but functional environment ready: warm standby
Near-full active environment: multi-site / active-active style

The exam often rewards the least expensive option that still meets the RTO/RPO stated in the prompt. If the question gives no aggressive recovery objective, do not automatically pick the fanciest architecture.

Permissions, encryption, and the ugly edge cases people miss

SysOps security questions are not usually deep red-team material. They are practical IAM and encryption troubleshooting questions where one missing permission breaks operations. These can be nasty because several answers look plausible.

The exam repeatedly tests these combinations:

EC2 instance profile permissions for SSM, CloudWatch agent, S3 access, or KMS decryption
S3 bucket policy interacting with IAM identity policy
KMS key policy blocking a service that otherwise has IAM permissions
Cross-account access using roles instead of long-lived credentials

The KMS angle is where many candidates bleed points. If an application, backup job, log delivery process, or snapshot copy operation fails on encrypted resources, do not stop at IAM. Ask whether the principal is actually allowed to use the CMK/KMS key. AWS loves to present access denied scenarios where the real blocker is the key policy or grant.

Useful exam reminders:

IAM policy allows do not override an explicit deny in a bucket policy or SCP.
Service-linked and service roles matter in managed automation scenarios.
If the question says temporary access or cross-account administration, assume STS / AssumeRole rather than creating users.
For encrypted S3 or EBS workflows, make sure the service or instance role can use the KMS key, not just access the resource.

A common S3 trap is lifecycle and versioning behavior. If the bucket is versioned, deleting an object does not necessarily remove prior versions. If the question is about cost growth or retention, versioning can be the hidden cause. Similarly, MFA delete sounds attractive in theory but is rarely the practical operational answer in exam scenarios.

For Config and compliance-style questions, Amazon often wants AWS Config rules or managed compliance visibility instead of custom scripts. If the requirement is to continuously evaluate resource settings such as open security groups, unencrypted volumes, or public S3 buckets, Config is usually the right operational service.

How to survive the labs without burning half your exam

The labs are where you need a different mindset. You are not trying to show every possible way to solve a problem. You are trying to make the requested change cleanly and verify it fast.

What makes SysOps labs tricky is that the tasks are usually operationally realistic but easy to overcomplicate. You may be asked to enable monitoring, fix access, configure scaling behavior, patch something, or restore expected connectivity. The danger is wandering through irrelevant console pages.

What helped me:

Read the task and identify the single service most likely involved before clicking anything.
If the task is about command access to instances, start with Systems Manager, not EC2 Connect, not random security group changes.
If the task is about alarms or notifications, start with CloudWatch and check whether an alarm already exists before creating new resources.
If the task is about a fleet behavior problem, check Auto Scaling, load balancer target group health, and launch template settings before touching the instances individually.
If the task is about backups or compliance scheduling, check AWS Backup or Systems Manager maintenance windows rather than creating ad hoc resources.

A few console habits matter:

Use the search bar aggressively. It is faster than drilling through menus, especially under pressure.
Verify the Region before doing anything. Labs love to waste your time if you start clicking in the wrong Region.
Do not create extra resources unless the task explicitly needs them. If the environment already contains the intended alarm, role, target group, or policy, the fix may be editing the existing object.
After making a change, confirm the visible status changed: alarm state, target health, policy attachment, instance managed status, or backup plan assignment.

Be careful with labs that involve IAM or networking because the effect may not appear instantly everywhere. If you made the right change, do not keep thrashing the environment by adding more edits. Over-fixing is a real way to fail a lab.

Also, know the names and locations of these settings in the console ahead of time:

EC2 instance profile attachment
Auto Scaling health check type and grace period
CloudWatch alarm actions
Systems Manager Fleet Manager / Managed Instances visibility
VPC endpoint creation and subnet/security group association
Target group health check path and port

If you have only studied through reading, spend your final prep doing these exact actions in a sandbox account.

The last week: what I would review again for amazon-aws-sysops

In the final week, I would stop broad studying and hammer the specific weak spots this exam keeps exploiting. A focused checklist is more useful than another full pass through every AWS service.

Review these until you can answer scenario questions without hesitation:

CloudWatch
- Alarm states, detailed monitoring, log metric filters, dashboards, anomaly detection basics, agent prerequisites.
Systems Manager
- Session Manager, Run Command, State Manager, Patch Manager, Automation, maintenance windows.
Auto Scaling + ELB
- Health checks, target groups, scaling policies, replacement behavior, launch template settings.
RDS operations
- Multi-AZ vs read replicas, backup retention, snapshots, failover expectations.
VPC troubleshooting
- Route tables, NAT gateway, IGW, security groups, NACLs, VPC endpoints, DNS support.
IAM/KMS operational failures
- Instance profiles, AssumeRole, bucket policy interactions, KMS key access for encrypted resources.
Backup and compliance
- AWS Backup, Config rules, log retention, lifecycle policies.

I would also do a rapid-fire review of these deceptively simple topics because they are common gotchas:

EBS volume types and when performance settings matter
S3 storage classes and lifecycle transitions
CloudFormation drift detection at a high level
Trusted Advisor and Personal Health Dashboard use cases
Organizations SCPs versus IAM permissions
Route 53 routing policies, especially failover and latency-based routing

One useful prep method for this exam is to rewrite weak topics as if/then rules. Example:

If private instances need admin shell access without bastions, then Session Manager plus SSM prerequisites.
If a DB needs higher availability, then Multi-AZ; if it needs read scaling, then read replicas.
If private subnets need S3 access without internet path, then gateway endpoint.
If a config must remain enforced over time, then State Manager rather than one-time Run Command.

That style matches how the exam is written. It is less about definitions and more about quickly matching symptoms to the correct AWS operational mechanism.

Finally, because Truekia has a large question bank for this cert, do not just memorize answer letters. Use the volume to identify recurring AWS patterns. If you see the same confusion points repeatedly — KMS permissions, NACL return traffic, Multi-AZ vs replica, Session Manager prerequisites, CloudWatch metric vs log distinctions — those are not random. They are exactly the places Amazon expects candidates to slip.