IICTI Certified Site Reliability Engineer

Holders demonstrate that they can apply and evaluate sLO engineering and multi-window burn-rate alerting, error budget policy, reliability governance and SRE leadership, observability architecture with OpenTelemetry and telemetry pipelines and distributed systems failure modes and resilience patterns, plus 6 further areas, in realistic professional scenarios, as defined in the AQSCERT scheme for Site Reliability Engineer.

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

1. 01SLO engineering and multi-window burn-rate alerting10% of the exam

   • Design SLIs, SLOs and burn-rate alerting that balance precision, recall, detection time and reset time for production services.
   • Scope: Critical-user-journey SLIs, request vs time-slice SLIs, histogram-based latency SLIs, PromQL recording rules, OpenSLO/Sloth specifications, multi-window multi-burn-rate alert design and low-traffic service strategies.
2. 02Error budget policy, reliability governance and SRE leadership10% of the exam

   • Lead reliability governance by defining error budget policies, engagement models and risk-based reliability investment decisions.
   • Scope: Error budget policies and escalation, SLA/SLO/internal objective layering, reliability risk analysis, toil budgets, production readiness reviews, engagement models and reliability investment trade-offs.
3. 03Observability architecture with OpenTelemetry and telemetry pipelines10% of the exam

   • Architect scalable, cost-controlled observability pipelines that correlate metrics, traces and logs for rapid diagnosis.
   • Scope: OpenTelemetry SDKs, Collector pipelines and semantic conventions, W3C Trace Context and baggage, head/tail sampling, exemplars, metric cardinality control, structured logging and correlation across signals.
4. 04Distributed systems failure modes and resilience patterns10% of the exam

   • Evaluate distributed-system failure modes and design resilience patterns that prevent cascading and metastable failures.
   • Scope: Retry storms, exponential backoff with jitter, retry budgets, deadlines and propagation, circuit breakers, load shedding, bulkheads, metastable failures, consensus and quorum behaviour, idempotency and graceful degradation.
5. 05Incident command, on-call design and major-incident response10% of the exam

   • Lead major-incident response and design sustainable on-call operations that minimise time to mitigate without burning out responders.
   • Scope: Incident Command System roles, severity frameworks, mitigation-first response, communications and status updates, escalation, on-call rotation design, alert hygiene, paging load limits and responder fatigue.
6. 06Post-incident analysis and systemic learning10% of the exam

   • Evaluate incidents systemically and drive post-incident actions that measurably reduce recurrence and organisational risk.
   • Scope: Blameless and just-culture reviews, contributing-factor analysis versus single root cause, STAMP/CAST, timeline reconstruction, counterfactual and hindsight bias, action-item quality and incident trend analysis.
7. 07Capacity engineering, load modelling and performance at scale10% of the exam

   • Design capacity plans and performance models that keep services within SLO under forecast growth, failures and load spikes.
   • Scope: Queueing theory and Little's Law, utilisation-latency curves, Universal Scalability Law, N+2 provisioning, demand forecasting, load testing methodology, autoscaling dynamics and tail-latency engineering.
8. 08Progressive delivery, change safety and toil-reducing automation10% of the exam

   • Architect release and automation systems that reduce change-induced incidents and toil while preserving delivery velocity.
   • Scope: Canary analysis, feature flags, blue-green and ring deployments, automated rollback, GitOps reconciliation, configuration change safety, toil identification and safe automation with guardrails.
9. 09Kubernetes and multi-region cloud platform reliability10% of the exam

   • Design and troubleshoot Kubernetes and cloud platforms that tolerate node, zone and region failures within defined SLOs.
   • Scope: Kubernetes probes, PodDisruptionBudgets, topology spread, resource requests/limits and throttling, control-plane and etcd health, zonal/regional failure domains, cell-based architecture and multi-region traffic management.
10. 10Chaos engineering, disaster recovery and resilience validation10% of the exam

    • Evaluate and validate system resilience through controlled experiments and disaster recovery exercises with measurable outcomes.
    • Scope: Steady-state hypotheses, blast-radius control, game days, fault injection tooling, RPO/RTO design, backup and restore verification, failover testing, DiRT-style exercises and ISO 22301-aligned continuity validation.

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