AZ-400 syllabus: every exam domain and topic

Configure processes and communications

10–15%

How work flows from idea to release, how teams get feedback, and how progress is measured and documented. Smallest technical load, but the details (AB# links, DORA metrics, wiki types) are tested.

Flow of work and traceability

A flow-of-work structure for the team, including GitHub Flow, Kanban boards and WIP limits
Feedback cycles: notifications, service hooks, GitHub Issues and issue templates
Tracking work with GitHub Projects, Azure Boards and linked repositories (AB# mentions, closing keywords)
Traceability from source, bugs and quality results back to work items, builds and releases

Metrics, queries and dashboards

Dashboards for flow of work: cycle time, lead time, time to recovery, cumulative flow, velocity
Metrics and queries for project planning
Metrics and queries for development
Metrics and queries for testing
Metrics and queries for security
Metrics and queries for delivery (DORA)
Metrics and queries for operations

Collaboration and communication

Project documentation in wikis, with Markdown and Mermaid diagrams
Release documentation: release notes and API documentation
Generating documentation automatically from Git history
Webhooks and service hooks for integration
Integrating Azure Boards with GitHub repositories
Integrating GitHub or Azure DevOps with Microsoft Teams

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Design and implement a source control strategy

10–15%

Branching, pull request governance and day-to-day repository management in Azure Repos and GitHub.

Branching strategies

Choosing between trunk-based, feature branch and release branch strategies
A pull request workflow built on branch policies (Azure Repos) and branch protection rules or rulesets (GitHub)
Merge restrictions: reviewers, status checks, merge types, code owners

Repository management

Large files with Git LFS, and the older git-fat
Scaling a repository: Scalar, partial clone, sparse checkout, and sharing code across repositories
Repository permissions in Azure Repos and GitHub
Tags to mark and organise releases
Recovering data with reflog, revert, restore and cherry-pick
Removing sensitive data from history with git filter-repo or BFG

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Design and implement build and release pipelines

50–55%

The largest domain by far (50-55%): packages, testing, YAML pipelines, agents, deployment strategies, infrastructure as code and keeping pipelines healthy.

Develop a security and compliance plan

10–15%

Identities, secrets and scanning for pipelines and repositories. The theme is no long-lived secrets and automated scanning.

Implement an instrumentation strategy

5–10%

Telemetry and monitoring for the DevOps toolchain and the apps it ships, including basic KQL. Smallest domain (5-10%).

Monitoring for a DevOps environment

Azure Monitor and Log Analytics integration with DevOps tools
Telemetry with Application Insights, VM insights, Container insights, Storage and Network monitoring
Monitoring in GitHub: insights and charts
Alerts for GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines events

Analysing metrics

Infrastructure indicators: CPU, memory, disk and network
Usage and application performance metrics from telemetry
Distributed tracing with Application Insights
Basic Kusto Query Language (KQL) queries

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