IICTI Certified Linux Administrator

Holders demonstrate that they can apply and evaluate boot chain integrity, systemd internals and unit hardening, kernel tuning, cgroups v2 and resource governance, performance analysis and eBPF-based observability and enterprise storage, volume management and filesystems, plus 7 further areas, in realistic professional scenarios, as defined in the AQSCERT scheme for Linux Administrator.

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

1. 01Boot chain integrity, systemd internals and unit hardening10% of the exam

   • Diagnose boot and service failures and design hardened, deterministic service units for production systems.
   • Scope: UEFI Secure Boot, shim/GRUB2 and unified kernel images, dracut initramfs, systemd dependency and ordering semantics, targets, and sandboxing directives (ProtectSystem, NoNewPrivileges, CapabilityBoundingSet) assessed with systemd-analyze security.
2. 02Kernel tuning, cgroups v2 and resource governance7% of the exam

   • Design resource isolation and kernel tuning profiles that keep critical workloads predictable under contention.
   • Scope: sysctl tuning, cgroup v2 controllers and systemd slices, pressure stall information (PSI), OOM behavior and oomd, NUMA, huge pages and the EEVDF scheduler.
3. 03Performance analysis and eBPF-based observability8% of the exam

   • Diagnose complex performance regressions to root cause using low-overhead kernel and userspace instrumentation.
   • Scope: USE and RED methods, perf, ftrace, bpftrace and BCC tools, flame graphs, PCP/sar baselining, and latency analysis across CPU, memory, disk and network.
4. 04Enterprise storage, volume management and filesystems12% of the exam

   • Architect resilient storage layouts and recover data and service after storage-layer failures.
   • Scope: LVM thin provisioning and snapshots, mdadm RAID, XFS/ext4/Btrfs/ZFS trade-offs, device-mapper multipath, iSCSI and NVMe-oF, LUKS2 encryption, and filesystem repair and recovery.
5. 05Linux networking, packet path and nftables11% of the exam

   • Diagnose packet-path and throughput problems and design host network configurations for high availability and performance.
   • Scope: iproute2, policy routing, bonding, VLANs and bridges, network namespaces, NetworkManager, nftables and conntrack, tc queueing disciplines, TCP stack tuning, and ss/tcpdump troubleshooting.
6. 06Mandatory access control and compliance-driven hardening10% of the exam

   • Design and validate a hardening baseline that meets compliance targets without breaking application behavior.
   • Scope: SELinux policy, contexts, booleans and denial analysis, AppArmor, seccomp and Landlock, auditd rule design, fapolicyd, kernel lockdown, CIS Benchmarks, DISA STIG and OpenSCAP scanning.
7. 07Centralized identity, authentication and privileged access9% of the exam

   • Architect centralized identity and privileged access for a heterogeneous Linux fleet with full accountability.
   • Scope: SSSD, FreeIPA/IdM and Active Directory integration via realmd and Kerberos, PAM stack design, sudo policy and session recording, SSH certificate authorities and MFA.
8. 08Fleet automation, configuration management and image-based operations10% of the exam

   • Design an automated, version-controlled operating model that keeps large fleets consistent and auditable.
   • Scope: Ansible roles, collections and Automation Platform, idempotency and testing (Molecule), GitOps workflows, Image Builder and Packer pipelines, drift detection and bootc image-mode systems.
9. 09Patch, lifecycle and in-place upgrade management8% of the exam

   • Lead a patch and lifecycle strategy that minimizes downtime and exposure across distributions and versions.
   • Scope: Repository and content management (Satellite/Foreman, Pulp, Landscape), kpatch and Livepatch, Leapp in-place upgrades, snapshot-based rollback, errata prioritization and EOL planning.
10. 10Virtualization and container hosting on Linux6% of the exam

    • Evaluate and design Linux virtualization and container hosts for density, isolation and performance.
    • Scope: KVM/libvirt and virtio tuning, CPU pinning and NUMA placement, live migration, rootless Podman, namespaces and container host hardening, and resource accounting for mixed workloads.
11. 11Crash analysis, recovery and disaster readiness9% of the exam

    • Lead recovery from severe system failures and produce evidence-based root cause analysis and prevention plans.
    • Scope: Rescue and emergency targets, kdump and crash dump analysis, journald and centralized logging, root cause analysis, Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) bare-metal recovery and DR testing.

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